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(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk said in a court filing that the US Federal Trade Commission’s concern over Microsoft Corp.’s $13 billion investment in OpenAI “confirms” the billionaire’s claims that the pact between the startup and technology giant is anticompetitive.
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Musk told a California federal judge that his request for an order blocking OpenAI from restructuring from a nonprofit to a for-profit company should be granted in light of the FTC’s Jan. 17 report that Microsoft is positioning itself to wield dominance in cloud computing in the fast-growing artificial intelligence market.
The FTC released its report in the final days of the Biden administration before Donald Trump was sworn in as president Monday. Trump on Tuesday announced billions of dollars in private sector investment to build artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US in a joint venture by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle called Stargate.
OpenAI and Microsoft declined to comment.
The Biden administration’s Justice Department joined the FTC on Jan. 10 in supporting Musk’s position that overlapping board directors at Microsoft and OpenAI can harm competition. In his filing late Monday, Musk urged the judge considering his injunction request against OpenAI to take that into consideration. A hearing on the injunction request is set for Feb. 4 in federal court in Oakland.
Musk has been waging a months-long legal attack on OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman, almost a decade after the two men worked together to launch OpenAI as a nonprofit with a stated mission to develop generative AI for the benefit of society.
Musk, who left OpenAI in 2018 and founded rival startup xAI in 2023, alleged in previous court filings that OpenAI broke its promises to him and abandoned its founding purpose as a charity when it accepted billions of dollars in backing from Microsoft starting in 2019. He also said that without quick court intervention to stop an “illegal” conversion by OpenAI to a for-profit business, it will soon be too late to stop Altman’s “behemoth” from crushing its rivals.
OpenAI is in early talks with the California attorney general’s office over the process to change its corporate structure, Bloomberg News reported last year.