The godfather of AI is throwing support behind Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI

An increasingly diverse coalition is forming in opposition to OpenAI’s plan to restructure 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 stop the corporate metamorphosis of OpenAI. The file came with the support of one of the biggest names in the field, the Nobel Prize and Turing, Geoffrey Hinton, who is often called the godfather of AI.

“OpenAI was founded as a non-profit organization explicitly focused on security and has made a variety of security-related promises in its charter,” Hinton said in a statement published by Encode with its brief. “It has received numerous tax and other benefits from its non-profit status. Allowing it to be torn away when it becomes inconvenient sends a very bad message to other players in the ecosystem.”

Hinton he recently told the BBC he believes there is a “10 percent to 20 percent” chance that AI will lead to human extinction within the next 30 years. Earlier, 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 restrictions on its mission and ability to raise money and compensate investors. The company formally announced its intention to restructure as a more traditional for-profit corporation last week, although the change had been anticipated for some time and Musk, who was a co-founder of OpenAI, filed his federal lawsuit seeking a preliminary injunction to stop it in November.

Encode argues that OpenAI’s planned change from a non-profit corporation to a Delaware public benefit corporation “would undermine specific security-focused commitments the association has made to the public.” In particular, the brief questions whether a for-profit corporation could ever fulfill OpenAI’s promise that it will “stop competing and start helping” any value-aligned organization that seems close to building artificial general intelligence before it does.

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

For its part, OpenAI has urged the court to reject Musk’s lawsuit, arguing that he lacks standing and is seeking to gain an unfair competitive advantage for his own AI startup, xAI. OpenAI has also released a so many e-mails and other messages from Musk, including several that the company said that Musk has shown to convert the organization into a profit as of 2017.