Elon Musk, Tesla Inc.’s chief executive and co-founder of OpenAI, today dropped his lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that had accused the company of a breach of contract for abandoning its founding mission of creating artificial general intelligence to benefit humanity.

Musk filed the lawsuit in a San Francisco court in February. He claimed that when OpenAI set out on its mission to give the world artificial intelligence, there’d been a “founding agreement” that said the technology would be made to “benefit of humanity” and the company would not operate as a “for-profit company.”

That agreement, he said, had been breached when after forming the partnership with Microsoft Corp., the company transformed “into a closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft whose focus was on maximizing profits. The lawsuit sought to force OpenAI to “return to its mission to develop AGI for the benefit of humanity.”

Musk helped found OpenAI back in 2015, working with Altman and current OpenAI President Greg Brockman as well as other AI researchers. At the time, the company was hailed as a nonprofit that would focus on AI with the condition that the products would not become something Musk had earlier warned about: killer robots.

The company said it wanted to “prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest.” Musk left the company in 2018 after some power struggles, and OpenAI went on to become a household name with its ChatGPT models. The relationship between the co-founders has been somewhat frayed since then.

Recently OpenAI hit back at Musk, explaining that it had proof that Musk had always supported the for-profit motives. Musk has also launched a ChatGPT competitor in xAI Corp., which is certainly a commercial product designed to reap monetary rewards rather than concentrate on making the world a better place.

It’s not certain why Musk dropped the lawsuit today, the day before the judge would decide if it was to be dismissed. Just yesterday, Musk threatened to ban Apple Inc. devices at his company due to Apple’s announcement of its new partnership with OpenAI. He said it was an “unacceptable security violation” and that if employees did bring such a device to work, they “have to check their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage.”

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