Twelve former OpenAI employees have asked a federal judge for permission to weigh in on Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman and the company. Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig filed the motion today on behalf of the ex-employees, whose detailed amicus brief accuses OpenAI of abandoning its nonprofit roots and betraying the mission that originally attracted them to the organization.
Elon Musk is suing OpenAI, its CEO, Sam Altman, and others, claiming that they betrayed the nonprofit mission that he helped establish back when OpenAI was founded in 2015. This week, OpenAI countersued Elon Musk over claims he has tried “nonstop” to slow down its business for his own benefit. The lawsuit said Musk has used “bad-faith tactics” against OpenAI to help him control AI technology.
The amicus, or “friend of the court,” brief filed in a California federal court on Friday includes some fiery language and allegations. Notably, in a three-page long declaration, former OpenAI researcher Todor Markov, who now works as a researcher at Anthropic, said that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman “was a person of low integrity who had directly lied to employees about the extent of his knowledge and involvement in OpenAI’s practices of forcing departing employees to sign lifetime non-disparagement agreements.” Markov went on to say that Altman was likely, therefore, to be lying to employees about other important topics including the sincerity of OpenAI’s commitment to its charter, which pledged to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is used for the benefit of all and avoids uses that harm humanity and concentrate power. It committed to prioritizing AGI safety research and avoiding a dangerous race to AGI that could lead to cutting corners.
“I realized the charter had been used as a smoke screen, something to attract and retain idealistic talent while providing no real check on OpenAI’s growth and its pursuit of AGI,” Markov said in the declaration. He also said that OpenAI’s public announcement of a plan to pursue a fully for-profit restructuring, contrary to its charter’s core commitments, “has only served to further convince me that OpenAI’s charter and mission were used all along as a facade to manipulate its workforce and the public.”
OpenAI, which was valued at $300 billion in its most recent funding round, did not comment directly on the filing’s allegations about Altman. In a statement, the company said: “Our board has been very clear: Our nonprofit isn’t going anywhere, and our mission will remain the same. We’re turning our existing for-profit arm into a public benefit corporation—the same structure as other AI labs like Anthropic—where some of these former employees now work—and xAI.”
If the judge overseeing the OpenAI/Musk case, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, accepts the amicus brief filing, it will become part of the court record and the judge can consider its arguments when it comes to deciding the next key issues in the case.
Markov told Fortune via DM on Friday that he has more to lose than to gain by participating in the lawsuit against his former employer. “I actually stand to lose a lot of money if Elon’s lawsuit is successful. A large fraction of my life’s savings are in OpenAI equity,” he said. “So anything that damages the value of that equity can have a fairly substantial impact on my own personal finances.”
The other former OpenAI employees in the filing, most of whom had titles related to AI safety and alignment research and policy, are Steven Adler, Rosemary Campbell, Neil Chowdhury, Jacob H. Hilton, Daniel Kokotajlo, Gretchen M. Krueger, Richard M.C. Ngo, Girish Sastry, William R. Saunders, Carroll L. Wainwright II, and Jeffrey K. Wu.
