Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk dropped his lawsuit against ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday. The lawsuit claimed they deviated from the company's original mission of developing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity rather than for profit.
Musk's lawyers filed a request with the California court to dismiss the lawsuit, originally filed in February, without providing a reason for the withdrawal. The relevant documents were submitted to the San Francisco Superior Court.
A Superior Court judge had planned to hear OpenAI's request for dismissal at a hearing on Wednesday.
Neither OpenAI nor Musk's attorneys immediately responded to requests for comment.
Musk withdrew his case "without prejudice," meaning he can refile the lawsuit at any time in the future.
The lawsuit marked the culmination of Musk's longstanding opposition to OpenAI, a startup he co-founded that has become a leader in generative AI through billions of dollars in funding from Microsoft.
In July of last year, Musk founded his own AI startup, xAI, which raised $6 billion in its Series B funding round in May, reaching a post-money valuation of $24 billion.
The lawsuit claimed that Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman had proposed to Musk the creation of an open-source, nonprofit company, but the startup founded in 2015 is now focused on profitability.
The lawsuit stated that OpenAI "set fire to the founding agreement" when it released its most powerful language model, GPT-4, last year.
In the lawsuit, Musk asked the court to order OpenAI to make its research and technology available to the public and to prevent the startup from using its assets, including GPT-4, for the financial benefit of Microsoft and other companies.
