He withdrew the lawsuit in June, but refiled it in August.
Hinton, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in physics in October, is known for his work developing artificial neural networks, the foundation for AI.
Co-founder Musk, who cut ties with OpenAI in 2018, is seeking to block the firm’s structure switch.
“It received numerous tax and other benefits from its non-profit status,” Hinton added. “Allowing it to tear all of that up when it becomes inconvenient sends a very bad message to other actors in the ecosystem.”
Geoffrey Hinton, the prominent data scientist known as the “Godfather of artificial intelligence,” is backing Elon Musk in his legal attempt to block OpenAI from switching to a for-profit company.
Musk, meanwhile, is arguing that OpenAI executives “deceived” him into co-founding the company by playing into his concerns about the risks of AI. OpenAI said that Musk wanted the company to transform into a for-profit structure back in 2017.
In February, he filed a lawsuit against OpenAI accusing it of breaking its nonprofit commitment by partnering with Microsoft.
OpenAI was initially created as a nonprofit research lab in 2015 by chief executive Sam Altman, Musk and others.
Hinton, who worked at Google for more than a decade, has criticized OpenAI’s safety measures before.
