Billionaire Elon Musk has withdrawn his lawsuit against artificial intelligence company OpenAI and its chief executive officer Sam Altman, just days before the case was set to be heard in a California court.

In a filing on Tuesday, attorneys for Musk moved to dismiss the lawsuit without providing a reason. The Tesla boss had accused OpenAI of abandoning its original non-profit mission of developing AI for the benefit of humanity, instead pursuing profits.

Musk's decision to drop the case comes as tensions escalate between him and Apple over the tech giant's newly announced partnership with OpenAI. On Monday, Apple unveiled 'Apple Intelligence' – a suite of AI capabilities integrated across its devices, powered in part by OpenAI's flagship ChatGPT model.

The move thrust Apple into the AI arms race alongside Microsoft, Google and others. However, Musk has lashed out at Apple, accusing it of an "unacceptable security violation" by integrating OpenAI at the operating system level. He threatened to ban Apple devices at his companies if the plans go ahead, alleging without evidence that user data could be turned over to OpenAI.

Originally filed in February, Musk's lawsuit marked a culmination of his simmering opposition to OpenAI, which joined in 2015 with the goal of making AI available as an open source and non-profit endeavour. He claimed OpenAI "set the founding agreement aflame" by pursuing commercial interests with the release of GPT-4 last year in partnership with Microsoft.

Musk sought to force OpenAI to make its research public and prevent it from using assets like GPT-4 for profit. OpenAI had argued the lawsuit was "incoherent" and a "contrived attempt" by Musk to advance his own AI interests through his startup Anthropic.

The dismissal allows Musk to potentially refile the case at a later date, but his focus has shifted to Apple's OpenAI integration amid the AI privacy debate. As firms race to implement generative AI, concerns over security and data handling remain a major point of contention. In the past 24 hours, Musk has set all newly created accounts on X – formerly known as Twitter – to have Apple’s official account blocked by default.

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