The California attorney general’s office declined to join a lawsuit by Elon Musk against OpenAI, the agency wrote in a letter made public on Tuesday, saying the office did not see how Musk’s action serves the public interest of the state.
Musk, a co-founder of the ChatGPT maker, is now in a feud with his co-founder Sam Altman, the current OpenAI chief executive, over the firm’s future.
OpenAI wants to remove its nonprofit board as its controlling power in exchange for a valuable equity stake. Musk’s suit argues this would threaten the nonprofit’s mission and he had asked the state to join the lawsuit.
In the letter dated Monday, the attorney general said Musk had not adequately shown that doing so would benefit the public and that Musk appeared to want to use OpenAI’s charitable assets for his own purposes. In February, a Musk-led consortium made an unsolicited $97 billion bid for control of OpenAI.
In a response letter to the attorney general on Tuesday, Musk’s lawyer said the attorney general misunderstood Musk’s bid for OpenAI, writing that Musk does not want to buy OpenAI if the nonprofit structure remains unchanged, and also pointed out that entities including a group of philanthropic leaders as well as former OpenAI employees have joined Musk in urging a stop to OpenAI’s transition.
Though the California attorney general’s office has declined to join Musk’s lawsuit, it remains involved in the issue: as the state overseer of nonprofits, it needs to approve OpenAI’s proposed nonprofit transition because OpenAI is based in California.