AI Daily: OpenAI countersues Musk, claims harassment

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

COUNTERSUIT: Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI has filed a countersuit against Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk, claiming harassment and asking a federal judge to stop Musk from any further attacks in a case over OpenAI’s future structure, Reuters’ Anna Tong reports. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 with Sam Altman, has tried to prevent the ChatGPT maker from transitioning to a for-profit model.

EXPORT RESTRICTIONS: After Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang went to Mar-a-Lago last week, the White House reversed course on Nvidia H20 export restrictions to China, in the works for months, NPR’s Emily Feng and Bobby Allyn report. According to two sources with knowledge of the plan, the export controls on H20 had been in the works for months, but the change of course came after Nvidia promised the Trump administration new U.S. investments in AI data centers.

AI WEAPONS: OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said he would not rule out helping the Pentagon develop a new weapons platform, the latest sign of a shift in how artificial intelligence companies think about working with the defense sector, Bloomberg’s Katrina Manson and Jamie Tarabay report. “I will never say never, because the world could get really weird,” Altman said on Thursday during remarks at the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats.

However, Altman cautioned that he didn’t expect to work on such a platform for the Pentagon “in the foreseeable future,” unless it would be a trade-off among really bad options. “I don’t think most of the world wants AI making weapons decisions,” he said in the conversation with Paul Nakasone, former head of the National Security Agency and a current OpenAI board member.