Elon Musk’s injunction filing, a Canadian publisher targeting the company, and ambitious plans for the next phase of growth. Here are some of OpenAI’s latest developments.

Mask vs. OpenAI: Intensifying legal battle

Elon Musk has escalated his legal battle against OpenAI. Last Friday, he filed for a preliminary injunction seeking to (among other things) halt OpenAI’s transition to a wholly-profit corporation until the lawsuit is resolved.

Musk was one of OpenAI’s co-founders in 2015, but resigned in 2018 over disagreements over the company’s direction. Since then, OpenAI moved to a limited profit model in 2019 and is now in the process of becoming fully commercial.

Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI (CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman) on February 29 of this year, alleging breach of charitable trust. That means the company has strayed from its original nonprofit mission of developing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity and violated the terms of Musk’s donation. The lawsuit was dropped without explanation in June 2024, but it was refiled in August and then expanded in scope in mid-November to add Microsoft as a defendant.

Microsoft has invested approximately US$14 billion in OpenAI since 2019.

Friday’s filing includes the following assertions:

  • OpenAI has abandoned its original nonprofit mission.
  • that OpenAI and its partners, including Microsoft, engaged in anticompetitive conduct, including investor restrictions, in violation of the Sherman Act;
  • that Microsoft profited from competitively sensitive information in violation of the Clayton Act;
  • that OpenAI’s leaders, including Sam Altman, engaged in self-dealing by transferring assets and intellectual property to commercial entities with financial interests;
  • If the injunction is not granted, Mr. Musk, OpenAI, and the public at large will suffer irreparable harm. For example, OpenAI and Microsoft’s dominance in the AI ​​market will be solidified, and Musk’s new venture, xAI, is at risk of losing access to critical investment capital.
  • Arguing that an injunction is advantageous in the public interest. OpenAI’s current practices are said to undermine public trust, stifle AI innovation, and accelerate the adoption of unsafe AI.

In response to Musk’s allegations, an OpenAI spokesperson dismissed the claims as “totally baseless.”

Mr. Musk’s xAI

While taking on OpenAI, Musk has also grown his own AI venture, xAI, into a formidable rival.

Founded in July 2023, xAI has already achieved a valuation of USD 50 billion and recently closed a USD 5 billion funding round. The company’s flagship product, the Grok chatbot, is integrated with Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter) and was trained using data from X.

xAI’s rapid growth has been supported by infrastructure investments, including the Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, which is comprised of 100,000 Nvidia GPUs and began operating in early September.

Canadian publisher sues OpenAI for copyright infringement

Also on Friday, five major Canadian news organizations (CBC/Radio-Canada, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Canadian Press, and Postmedia) accused OpenAI of using their proprietary articles without permission. filed a groundbreaking lawsuit. Train the ChatGPT model.

The lawsuit, filed in Ontario Superior Court, seeks damages of up to C$20,000 for each article.

The plaintiffs allege that OpenAI “scrapes” proprietary content from news websites, bypassing copyright protection measures such as paywalls and disclaimers. “They are strip-mining journalism while doing so to the detriment of publishers and essentially, unfairly and illegally lining their own pockets,” said Paul Deegan, president of News Media Canada.

If successful, the lawsuit could result in billions of dollars in damages and could set a precedent for how AI companies approach copyrighted materials.

OpenAI maintains that its actions fall under fair use doctrine, but the plaintiffs argue that the scale and nature of the alleged infringement far exceeds what is permissible.

This lawsuit is part of a broader lawsuit against AI companies, including:

  • December 2023: The New York Times claims that ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot reproduced Times articles without permission. This incident is currently under investigation.
  • April 2024: Eight U.S. newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Daily News, allege that OpenAI and Microsoft illegally collected copyrighted articles to train AI models.
  • October 2024: The publishers of the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal sued Perplexity AI, alleging that the AI ​​startup copied significant amounts of their copyrighted content without permission.

What’s next for OpenAI?

OpenAI is valued at $157 billion, but faces significant costs, spending more than $5 billion a year, and is facing significant costs, including Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity AI and xAI’s Grok. It also faces competition from its rivals.

Despite the challenges, the company is moving forward with an ambitious roadmap. It has 250 million weekly active users and is expected to reach 1 billion by 2025.