The godfather of artificial intelligence backs Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI

An increasingly diverse coalition is forming against OpenAI’s plan to restructure itself into a fully for-profit company.

On Monday, Encode, a youth-led advocacy organization representing young people in dozens of countries, filed an amicus brief in support of Elon Musk’s ongoing lawsuit to halt OpenAI’s corporate metamorphosis. The filing came with the support of one of the biggest names in the field, Nobel Prize and Turing Prize winner Jeffrey Hinton, who is often called the godfather of AI.

“OpenAI was founded as an explicitly safety-focused non-profit organization and made various safety-related promises in its charter,” Hinton said in a statement published by Encode alongside its brief. “It received numerous tax and other benefits from its non-profit status. Allowing him to tear it all apart when it becomes inconvenient sends a very bad message to other participants in the ecosystem.

Hinton told the BBC recently he believes there is a “10 percent to 20 percent” chance that AI will make humans extinct in the next 30 years. Previously, Hinton was more modest, putting the odds at just 10 percent.

OpenAI is currently structured as a for-profit company controlled by a non-profit board, which places some limitations on its mission and ability to raise money and compensate investors. The company officially announced its intention to restructure as a more traditional for-profit corporation last week, although the change had been expected for some time and Musk, who co-founded OpenAI, filed its federal lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction in November.

Encode argued that OpenAI’s planned transition from a nonprofit to a Delaware public benefit corporation would “undermine specific safety-focused commitments that the nonprofit has made to the public.” In particular, the brief question of whether a for-profit corporation could ever deliver on OpenAI’s promise to “stop competing with and start helping” any worthwhile organization that looks close to building artificial general intelligence before it do.

“Today, a handful of companies are racing to develop and deploy transformative AI, internalizing the profits but externalizing the consequences for all of humanity,” Sneha Revanur, president and founder of Encode, said in a statement. “Courts must step in to ensure that AI development serves the public interest.”

For its part, OpenAI has urged the court to dismiss Musk’s lawsuit, arguing that he lacked standing and was seeking to gain an unfair competitive advantage for his own AI startup, xAI. OpenAI also released a set of emails and other announcements from Musk, including several that the company said showed Musk was advocating for the organization to become a for-profit as early as 2017.