OpenAI’s legal battles are not putting off customers—yet

Pity OpenAI’s lawyers. On February 29th Elon Musk added yet another problem to their list by suing the maker of ChatGPT, a wildly popular artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot, for breach of contract. The lawsuit argues that the startup was originally set up as a non-profit with the aim of building AI for the “benefit of humanity”, but has since established a profit-making subsidiary and accepted a large investment from Microsoft, a tech titan valued at $3trn, in exchange for exclusive access to its technology. According to Mr Musk, who was an early investor in OpenAI and has since founded a rival, xAI, these actions benefit not humanity but “literally the largest company in the world”.