On its last business day, the Biden administration issued a report that now has an unlikely fan.
Elon Musk is using the report as evidence in his antitrust suit against Sam Altman and OpenAI.
Biden’s outgoing DOJ also weighed in on Musk’s behalf.
Former President Joe Biden left Elon Musk what amounts to a parting gift: a pair of scholarly papers drafted by his Justice Department and his Federal Trade Commission.
Both describe the potential illegality of overly-cozy partnerships between giant cloud service providers like Microsoft and leading artificial intelligence developers like OpenAI.
Musk is now using these Biden administration filings as fuel for his ongoing 2024 lawsuit against colleague-turned-rival Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO. The two men helped co-found OpenAI in 2015, with Musk sinking $44 million into the venture before their falling out three years later.
Musk’s lawsuit accuses Altman of betraying OpenAI’s founding mission as a non-profit research lab dedicated to keeping AI technology safe and freely available for the good of mankind.
Under Altman’s leadership, OpenAI is now “a $157 billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon,” the most recent version of the lawsuit alleges.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, who in 2023 launched a competing AI effort, is seeking to break up the mutually beneficial — he says monopolistic — partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft.
Under the partnership, the software giant provides vital cloud server space and funding — a “$13 billion commitment,” the lawsuit alleges. In return, Microsoft gets exclusive rights to the startup’s technology, a suite of AI products that includes ChatGPT.
Musk’s lawsuit, filed in federal court in Oakland, California, accuses Altman of racketeering, calling the four-year-old Microsoft-OpenAI alliance an unregulated “de facto merger.” He seeks to void the companies’ licensing agreement and pocket cash damages.
Microsoft “stands to make hundreds of billions from its methodical infiltration of, and increasing leverage over, the non-profit, its technology, and employees,” the suit alleges.
Musk spent at least $277 million backing President Donald Trump’s campaign for reelection. Still, the Biden administration’s recent support of Musk’s claims is not surprising, his attorney, Marc Toberoff, told Business Insider on Friday.
Concern over Big Tech monopolies goes beyond politics, the lawyer said.
“The DOJ and FTC took principled stands,” Toberoff said of the back-to-back Biden administration filings. “Concern over OpenAI and Microsoft transcends party, because their coordinated conduct threatens the safe and effective development of by far the most transformative technology of our time.”
