Musk escalates OpenAI fight

Elon Musk is no longer just asking a court to punish OpenAI on paper. In a filing reported on April 7, he asked for Sam Altman to be removed from OpenAI’s nonprofit board and for Altman and Greg Brockman to be removed as officers of the for-profit arm before a jury trial set to start April 27 in federal court in Oakland, California. (cnbc.com) Musk’s lawsuit says OpenAI took money and trust that were tied to a nonprofit mission, then built something much more commercial. CNBC reported that Musk says he was induced to donate $38 million on the understanding that OpenAI would remain a nonprofit research lab. (cnbc.com) The remedy he wants is unusually direct. His lawyers told the court that removing charity leaders is a standard fix when they stop carrying out a charity’s mission, and they also want OpenAI pushed back toward operating as a real nonprofit. (cnbc.com) OpenAI answered with the legal equivalent of a slap. The company said Musk is “pretending to change his tune” and called the case a harassment campaign driven by “ego, jealousy and a desire to slow down a competitor.” (cnbc.com; openai.com) That competitor point is not abstract. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, left in 2018 after trying to merge it with Tesla, and now runs xAI, which means he is suing one artificial intelligence company while building another. (cnbc.com; openai.com) OpenAI’s own structure is part of why this fight is so messy. CNBC reported that after a restructuring completed in October, the nonprofit now runs the organization while holding a 26% stake in the for-profit arm that includes ChatGPT. (cnbc.com) The court fight is happening at the same time a second legal front is getting wider: the data used to train these systems. On April 8, CNET reported that YouTube creators sued Amazon in Seattle federal court, alleging Amazon scraped millions of YouTube videos to build Nova Reel, its text-to-video model. (cnet.com) That complaint is not just about copying videos one by one. The creators say Amazon used virtual machines and rotating internet addresses to get around YouTube’s bulk-download protections, which is why the suit invokes both copyright law and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (cnet.com; geekwire.com) The named plaintiffs make the case feel less theoretical. GeekWire reported that they include Ted Entertainment, the company behind h3h3 Productions and H3 Podcast Highlights, plus golf creators Matt Fisher and Golfholics. (geekwire.com) So the artificial intelligence industry is now fighting two battles at once in U.S. courts. One battle asks who gets to control the companies making the models, and the other asks whether the raw material inside those models was taken with permission in the first place. (cnbc.com; cnet.com; geekwire.com)