Elon Musk has formally filed a lawsuit with the California court, suing OpenAI and its major investor Microsoft, demanding the return of over $134 billion (approximately 935 billion yuan) in "unjust enrichment." This lawsuit not only involves a large sum of money but also directly addresses the core controversy of OpenAI's transition from a non-profit organization to a commercial entity—Musk accuses it of deviating from its original mission and becoming a closed-source AI subsidiary of Microsoft.
According to the complaint, Musk's legal team cited third-party expert valuation reports indicating that his early investments (2015–2018), technical resources, and personal influence should have entitled him to rights commensurate with his contributions. Although he left the board due to disagreements with the board on the direction of development in 2018, he believes that OpenAI rapidly commercialized after receiving hundreds of billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft, and made core models like GPT proprietary, which essentially violated its initial non-profit mission of "ensuring that general artificial intelligence benefits all humanity."
Musk specifically emphasized that OpenAI is now deeply tied to Microsoft—ranging from exclusive training on Azure cloud to system-level integration with Windows—making it lose its independence and become a "strategic weapon" for Microsoft in the AI competition against Google and Amazon, rather than a guardian of public interest.
In response, OpenAI quickly commented, calling this lawsuit a "baseless harassment" aimed at disrupting its R&D process and promoting Musk's own AI company xAI. OpenAI stressed that Musk had completely left the board and daily operations as early as 2018, and all subsequent strategic decisions were made by the current management and investors. The company's spokesperson stated: "He seriously distorted historical facts."
Notably, this lawsuit comes at a time when global AI competition is intensifying. Musk's xAI is fully advancing the Grok large model and plans to integrate it into the X platform and Tesla product line. Filing a legal challenge against OpenAI at this moment is both a declaration of AI governance philosophy and seen as a battle for the "moral high ground" in AI and public opinion.
If the court supports some of Musk's claims, it could force OpenAI to re-examine its equity structure, open-source commitments, and the boundaries of its collaboration with Microsoft; even if it loses, the case has already raised a sharp question to the entire industry: When AI companies move from idealistic laboratories to billion-dollar commercial empires, who has the right to define the ownership of "general artificial intelligence"? How can innovation speed be balanced with public responsibility?
Beneath this $134 billion bet, the real trial may be the original intention of the entire AI era.
