Billionaire Elon Musk has filed a new lawsuit against OpenAI and its leadership, just weeks after withdrawing a previous suit against the artificial intelligence startup he co-founded in 2015.

Filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the new suit revives Musk's claims from the earlier case. It alleges that the company, along with two of his fellow co-founders, current CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, breached their founding mission of developing open-source artificial general intelligence (AGI) technology for humanity's benefit. Musk departed the company's board in 2018 after he felt it had fallen behind Google in the AI race.

Allegations of betrayal

The latest complaint states, "After Musk lent his name to the venture, invested significant time, tens of millions of dollars in seed capital, and recruited top AI scientists for OpenAI, Inc., Musk and the non-profit's namesake objective were betrayed by Altman and his accomplices."

It further alleges that once OpenAI's technology began to transform generative artificial intelligence, Altman "flipped the narrative and proceeded to cash in."

Dispute over licensing with Microsoft

The suit seeks a judicial determination that OpenAI's license to Microsoft to use its AI models is null and void. Musk also contends that OpenAI's language models are outside the scope of the company's partnership with Microsoft.

OpenAI has a licensing partnership with Microsoft, under which the tech giant invests billions of dollars into the startup in exchange for using its large language models for its computing services.

Previous lawsuit withdrawn

In June, Musk withdrew an earlier lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman that accused them of abandoning the startup's original mission to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity rather than for profit. Attorneys for Musk had asked the California state court to dismiss the suit, originally filed in February, without providing a reason for the move.

The withdrawn lawsuit had elicited a response from OpenAI's executives, who wrote a blog post detailing the company's history with Musk. Altman, Brockman, and fellow co-founder Ilya Sutskever wrote in March that they "intend to move to dismiss all of Elon's claims." They also shared Musk's communications with them about OpenAI's structure during that period, revealing that Musk had floated the idea of merging OpenAI with Tesla, sought to be the company's CEO, and aimed to have majority control of its equity and the board of directors.

OpenAI's response

When reached for comment on Monday, an OpenAI spokesperson told FOX Business, "As we said about Elon's initial legal filing, which was subsequently withdrawn, Elon's prior emails continue to speak for themselves."

Musk's AI ventures

Last year, Musk unveiled a new AI company called xAI with a chatbot called Grok that he billed as a rival to OpenAI. In May, xAI announced that it received $6 billion in Series B funding from investors, including Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, and Kingdom Holding, according to the company.