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Elon Musk has escalated his ongoing conflict with OpenAI by adding Microsoft as a defendant in a revived lawsuit against the AI company.

Musk, who co-founded OpenAI, accused the company and Microsoft of operating a monopoly in an amended legal complaint.

The complaint follows previous lawsuits where Musk claimed that OpenAI breached the principles agreed upon when it was founded in 2015.

An OpenAI spokesperson responded to Musk's renewed complaint, calling it "baseless" and highlighting that Musk's previous attempts to reframe his claims were also without merit.

The legal filing, which amends a lawsuit initially filed in California in August, also names LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman as a defendant.

The lawsuit accuses OpenAI of transforming from a tax-exempt charity into a $157 billion for-profit entity, which Musk describes as a "market-paralysing gorgon."

Musk's lawsuit claims that Microsoft and OpenAI used their monopoly to eliminate competitors in the AI sector, including Musk's own company, xAI.

According to the complaint, the defendants have been unjustly enriched by hundreds of billions of dollars, while Musk and the public have been deceived.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 with the goal of building an artificial general intelligence (AGI) that could perform any task a human being is capable of.

In 2019, the firm announced a new "capped profit" structure to raise funds, leading to an initial $1 billion investment from Microsoft. This investment grew into a multi-year, multi-billion dollar partnership in 2023.

The lawsuit also accuses OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, a named defendant, of engaging in "rampant self-dealing."

Musk's initial legal action, filed in March, argued that OpenAI had become a "closed-source de facto subsidiary" of Microsoft.

OpenAI denied these claims and countered that Musk had previously supported the idea of a for-profit structure.

In response to Musk's original lawsuit, OpenAI published a blog post stating that the billionaire had once sought "absolute control" of the company.

The renewed claims by Musk coincide with the announcement that US President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Musk for a government role aimed at cost-cutting and dismantling bureaucracy as part of his upcoming administration.

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