Godfather of AI Throws Support Behind Elon Musk’s Lawsuit Against OpenAI

An increasingly diverse coalition is forming in opposition to OpenAI’s plan to restructure itself into a fully for-profit company.

On Monday, Encode, a youth-led advocacy organization representing young people in dozens of countries, filed an amicus brief in support of Elon Musk’s ongoing lawsuit to stop OpenAI’s corporate metamorphosis. The filing came with support from one of the biggest names in the field, Nobel and Turing prizes award-winner Geoffrey Hinton, who is often called the godfather of AI.

“OpenAI was founded as an explicitly safety-focused non-profit and made a variety of safety-related promises in its charter,” Hinton said in a statement released by Encode along with its brief. “It received numerous tax and other benefits from its non-profit status. Allowing it to tear all of that up when it becomes inconvenient sends a very bad message to other actors in the ecosystem.”

Hinton recently told the BBC he believes there is a “10 percent to 20 percent” chance that AI will lead to human extinction within the next 30 years. Previously, Hinton’s been more modest, putting the odds at just 10 percent.

OpenAI is currently structured as a for-profit company controlled by a non-profit board, which places some restrictions on its mission and ability to raise money and compensate investors. The company formally announced its intention to restructure itself as a more traditional for-profit corporation last week, although the change had been anticipated for some time and Musk, who was a cofounder of OpenAI, filed his federal lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction to stop it in November.

Encode argues that OpenAI’s planned shift from a nonprofit to a Delaware public benefit corporation would “undermine specific safety-focused commitments the nonprofit has made to the public.” In particular, the brief questions whether a for-profit corporation could ever fulfill OpenAI’s promise that it will “stop competing with and start assisting” any value-aligned organization that appears close to building artificial general intelligence before it does.

“Today, a handful of companies are racing to develop and deploy transformative AI, internalizing the profits but externalizing the consequences to all of humanity,” Sneha Revanur, the president and founder of Encode, said in a statement. “The courts must intervene to ensure AI development serves the public interest.”

For its part, OpenAI has urged the court to reject Musk’s lawsuit, arguing that he lacks standing and is seeking to gain an unfair competitive advantage for his own AI startup, xAI. OpenAI also released a trove of emails and other messages from Musk, including several that the company said showed Musk advocated for converting the organization to a for-profit as early as 2017.