Microsoft (MSFT) and OpenAI, in which the Windows and Office maker is an investor, received a rejection of their request seeking to dismiss claims made by Tesla (TSLA) Chief Executive Elon Musk against the ChatGPT owner.
Musk had claimed that OpenAI betrayed its founding mission as a public charity when it took billions in funding from Microsoft and made plans to operate as a for-profit business.
In her ruling, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers wrote that while the evidence is unclear, Musk's claims that his gift to OpenAI "had a specific charitable purpose and that he attached two fundamental terms to it: that OpenAI be open source and that it would remain a nonprofit."
The judge also ordered that the case shall proceed to a jury trial, set for late April, as reported by Bloomberg on Friday.
"Mr. Musk's lawsuit continues to be baseless and a part of his ongoing pattern of harassment, and we look forward to demonstrating this at trial," the news report cited a statement from OpenAI.
OpenAI, Musk, and Microsoft did not immediately respond to an out-of-office-hours request for comment from MTNewswires.