Morgan Chu

As chair of Irell & Manella LLP's litigation group and its former co-managing partner, Morgan Chu is a prominent intellectual property attorney, a magna cum laude Harvard Law School grad and a 47-year veteran of the firm.

Two of his cases have attained legend status. In 2022, Chu co-led the team that scored a pair of whopping wins for VLSI Technology LLC: a $2.3 billion final judgment -- the largest patent judgment in U.S. history -- plus a $948 million jury verdict, in separate infringement suits against Intel Corp. VLSI Technology LLC v. Intel Corp., 6:21-cv-00057 (W.D. Tex., filed April 11, 2019); VLSI Technology LLC v. Intel Corp., 1:19-cv-00977 (W.D. Tex., filed April 11, 2019).

So this year, when one of the world's richest persons, Elon Musk, decided to sue two former business partners and the artificial intelligence powerhouse they founded in 2015, OpenAI Inc., Musk turned to Chu. Musk v. Altman et al., CGC-24-612746 (S.F. Super. Ct., filed Feb. 29, 2024).

Musk's suit concerns a key issue: the dangers to humankind of uncontrolled artificial general intelligence powering machines that take up human tasks. According to Musk, he, Sam Altman and Gregory Brockman founded OpenAI as a nonprofit that would develop AGI for the benefit of humanity in opposition to Google LLC's for-profit DeepMind AGI project.

Musk's retention of Chu appeared to be a good fit among client, lawyer and subject matter.

Chu has for decades observed computer science's edge toward greater capabilities. "I've been watching this for a long time," he said. "We are working with clients in many sectors that use AI," such as medicine. One landmark was when AI programs in IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer took on and eventually defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov in the 1990s -- an event Chu referenced in the complaint he drafted for Musk as an important step in the AI evolution.

Musk's conviction that AGI poses a grave threat to humanity mirrors concerns raised by the likes of Stephen Hawking and Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy, Chu's complaint states. "But where some like Mr. Musk see an existential threat in AGI, others see AGI as a source of profit and power."

The complaint accuses Altman and Brockman of breaching OpenAI's founding agreement about openness in 2023 by failing to make available to the public the technology behind its most powerful language model, GPT-4. The secrecy "is primarily driven by commercial considerations, not safety," the complaint says.

"Elon Musk is brilliant and he speaks his mind," Chu said. "He understands AI very well, and its dangers are a main concern." Chu added that he enjoys being part of Musk's case. "It's great fun for me," Chu said.

-- John Roemer