Why OpenAI wants $1 million from Elon Musk’s xAI amid Apple lawsuit

OpenAI has asked the court to award $1 million from Elon Musk’s xAI company after the former was hit with a lawsuit filed by Apple over the allegations of trade secrets theft.

In the midst of legal challenges, Sam Altman is now seeking such hefty legal costs from his long-standing rival Elon Musk over the dismissal of xAI's trade secret lawsuit.

According to the CEO of OpenAI as reported by Bloomberg, xAI’s trade secrets lawsuit should never have been filed in the first place. Under this lawsuit, the CEO of SpaceX accused the AI company of encouraging ex-employees to steal confidential data from the company, but offered no evidence to substantiate its claims.

Later, the judges dismissed xAI’s founder allegations and ruled that hiring practices were routine and not based on illicit activities. A federal judge in San Francisco tossed out the lawsuit earlier this year, stating that xAI lacked proof that OpenAI had encouraged any misconduct.

"xAI sued OpenAI first and looked for evidence later, forcing OpenAI to spend substantial resources defeating a sprawling, aggressively litigated trade secret claim for which xAI had no evidentiary support," OpenAI's lawyers wrote.

The OpenAI’s announcement to seek legal costs came on Monday after the Grok chatbot maker revealed that it plans to appeal repeatedly dismissed claims regarding the role of OpenAI in alleged misconduct.

The developments have proved dramatic for Sam Altman as he is also facing a lawsuit from Apple who alleged that the tech giant stole confidential hardware designs and manufacturing processes to build their own devices.

Moreover, the iPhone maker also accused OpenAI of encouraging some of its employees to “share confidential information, product components, engineering drawings and other materials related to future Apple devices.” 

With lawsuit filed by Apple, the public feud between Elon Musk and Sam Altman has deepened as they exchanged barbs on X platform. 

In response to this alleged lawsuit, Musk criticized Altman calling him a “scammer” who took this alleged crime to another new level. Musk also claimed on his X post that OpenAI CEO “had graduated from stealing an open source AI charity to trying to steal all of Apple’s phone technology.”