For the public good?
Musk’s shifting stance on AI dangers may complicate trial over OpenAI’s mission.
Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
A hotly anticipated trial starts this week, where Elon Musk will attempt to prove that OpenAI, under Sam Altman, has abandoned its mission to remain a nonprofit in order to ensure that artificial intelligence serves humanity, and not just billionaires.
Many view the lawsuit as a grudge match between Musk—who left OpenAI after serving as an early major donor and advisor—and Altman—who currently runs OpenAI, despite insiders’ allegedly growing distrust in his commitment to the dominant AI firm’s mission. But the lawsuit is about much more than a couple billionaires’ big egos. The outcome could radically change the AI landscape, impacting how OpenAI runs and what resources the firm will have to uphold its mission.
If Musk wins, OpenAI’s hopes of growing a for-profit arm that can fund the nonprofit could be dashed. Additionally, Brockman and Altman could be dropped as officers, and Altman risks losing his seat on OpenAI’s board.
If Altman wins, OpenAI’s mission could be lost—with the AI startup perhaps following in the footsteps of Google, which famously vowed that “Don’t be evil” drove its business decisions, but no longer seems bound by that unofficial motto.
Jury selection starts Monday, but jurors won’t have the final say in either the liability phase of the trial or the remedies phase, if the trial reaches that point. Instead, a US district judge in Northern California, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, will consider the jury’s insights during phase one before making the ultimate decision in both phases.
Since the lawsuit was filed, OpenAI has cast Musk as intensely jealous of Altman’s company, while claiming that the litigation is nothing more than a continuation of an alleged harassment campaign. OpenAI suspects that Musk is using the litigation as a delay tactic while his own AI firm, xAI—recently folded into SpaceX—races to catch up to OpenAI’s lead after the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.
However, Musk, who unsurprisingly spent the morning ahead of jury selection posting jabs at Altman and OpenAI on X, recently vowed to give all damages to OpenAI’s nonprofit arm if he wins. That move, which came late in the litigation, seemingly underscored to jurors that, of the two billionaires, Musk is supposedly the one most committed to AI safety and AI as a public good.
“Scam Altman and Greg Stockman stole a charity,” Musk wrote on X on Monday. “Full stop.”
In the post, Musk pleaded his case, claiming that a loss would mean that “it is OK to loot a charity” in America, which he said risked undermining “all charitable giving in the United States forever.”
“I could have started OpenAI as a for-profit corporation,” Musk wrote. “Instead, I started it, funded it, recruited critical talent, and taught them everything I know about how to make a startup successful FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD. Then they stole the charity.”
As of this writing, Altman has not posted about the trial starting. However, in February, Altman wrote on X that he was “really excited to get Elon under oath in a few months, Christmas in April!”
On Monday, the OpenAI newsroom echoed that post, writing on X that “we can’t wait to make our case in court where both the truth and the law are on our side.”
“This lawsuit has always been a baseless and jealous bid to derail a competitor. We’ll also finally have the chance to question Mr. Musk under oath before a jury of Californians about this attempt to undermine our work to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity,” OpenAI said.
Revealing docs may tip the win to Musk
Thousands of pages of internal documents have already been shared, and both Musk and Altman have given depositions ahead of the trial’s start.
According to Reuters, the “bitter legal fight” may be decided by “a few pages ” in a personal diary written by Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and a co-founder.
“This is the only chance we have to get out from Elon,” Brockman wrote in 2017, while pondering if Musk would be the “glorious leader” that he would pick to run the company.
At that time, the other co-founders were sincerely questioning both Musk and Altman’s motivations for wanting to become OpenAI’s CEO.
In the earliest emails that Musk and Altman exchanged in 2015, the two agreed that to prevent Google from dominating AI—or a similarly financially motivated startup—OpenAI should be set up “so that the tech belongs to the world via some sort of nonprofit, but the people working on it get startup-like compensation if it works.”
Musk reminded Altman that he wouldn’t “fund something that goes in what turns out to be the wrong direction,” and Altman commended Musk as the “main inspiration” behind early governance talks.
By early 2016, emails suggested that Musk was meeting with OpenAI’s leadership team weekly to ensure “OpenAI’s long term success” and had agreed to increase donations to keep OpenAI’s mission on track. The partnership seemed to be going so well that by mid-2016, Musk was gifting the other founders with Teslas in appreciation for what they had done “to get OpenAI to where it is today.”
Within months, however, the friendliness fell off, and in September 2017, Musk bluntly told Altman, Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and Sam Teller that he’d “had enough.” That email came after Sutskever and Brockman admitted that they had been too “afraid of harming the relationship” or losing their partnerships with Altman and Musk by raising concerns about either man’s fitness to lead OpenAI.
“Elon: We really want to work with you,” that email said, insisting they were willing to do “whatever it takes to work with you. But we realized that we were careless in our thinking about the implications of control for the world.”
“The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI,” their email said. It continued:
“You stated that you don’t want to control the final AGI, but during this negotiation, you’ve shown to us that absolute control is extremely important to you. As an example, you said that you needed to be CEO of the new company so that everyone will know that you are the one who is in charge, even though you also stated that you hate being CEO and would much rather not be CEO. Thus, we are concerned that as the company makes genuine progress towards AGI, you will choose to retain your absolute control of the company despite current intent to the contrary. We disagree with your statement that our ability to leave is our greatest power, because once the company is actually on track to AGI, the company will be much more important than any individual.”
“The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship,” their email reminded Musk.
Similarly, they shared concerns about Altman, noting to him that “we haven’t been able to fully trust your judgements throughout this process.”
“We don’t understand why the CEO title is so important to you,” their email said. “Your stated reasons have changed, and it’s hard to really understand what’s driving it. Is AGI truly your primary motivation? How does it connect to your political goals? How has your thought process changed over time?”
In response, Altman said that he lost trust in Brockman and Sutskever, whose “messaging was inconsistent and felt childish at times.” Altman was also “bothered by how much Greg and Ilya keep the whole team in the loop with happenings” around a potential for-profit restructuring, the email said.
At that point, the for-profit bid was briefly dropped, and Musk left the OpenAI board. About 13 months later, OpenAI formed a for-profit entity in March 2019, Reuters noted. That put the company strategically on track to potentially go public in the final quarter of 2026—following an $852 billion valuation—unless Musk’s lawsuit blocks the move.
Musk and Altman lock horns in depositions
Musk contributed about $38 million to OpenAI during its early years, which was about 60 percent of the donations that helped propel the AI firm to its success today. According to Musk, he’s now owed $134 billion in damages if the judge agrees that OpenAI abandoned its mission. In total, OpenAI and Microsoft could owe more than $150 billion, Musk’s expert has estimated.
OpenAI has mocked that math, so it remains unclear how high damages could go if the second part of the trial becomes necessary. OpenAI maintains that Musk’s contributions were tax-deductible donations—not investments—and he therefore has no claim to ownership over the firm, The Guardian reported.
The credibility of both men has been called into question. During his deposition, Musk was called out for inflating his early contributions to OpenAI. He claimed it was a “mistake” that he initially posted on X that he donated $100 million, simply forgetting how much he ultimately paid out.
Inconsistencies may matter to the jury, which will be tasked with weighing which tech leader is most credibly committed to AI safety. Musk testified that while he couldn’t remember exact details of an early dinner with co-founders where the mission was discussed, he did believe that he was the driving force behind OpenAI’s early bid to put safety first when developing AI.
To help prove this, Musk shared the reason why he didn’t start an AI company until 2023, when he founded xAI.
“The reason I didn’t initially go into artificial intelligence was because I wasn’t sure whether the double-edged sword of AI would do more harm or more good,” Musk testified. However, this initial mentality that “the danger of an apocalypse was too great” was “naïve,” he said, “because even if I don’t focus on AI, others will.”
Altman has muddied the waters on Musk’s moral stance, saying in his deposition that he didn’t know if AI safety was Musk’s “top thing” but rather that he turned to Musk to help launch OpenAI because he felt that he could convince Musk to “care more” about AI safety.
When testifying, Altman disputed Musk’s claims that he attracted early talent and additional funders, saying that some people had a “great deal of confidence” in Musk, while others had “serious concerns.”
To back his claims that he’s the CEO more invested in AI safety, Altman lashed out at Musk’s AI company, xAI. He claimed that Musk released “anime sex bots for children” and has shown a “flagrant disregard of basic safety testing” with Grok. (He did not at that time mention OpenAI’s reputation as harmful after lawsuits linked ChatGPT to suicides and murders.)
Like Musk, Altman shared why he became interested in AI, saying that as a child he was a “sci-fi nerd” who “thought it would be one of the coolest things that humanity could ever build” and could become “one of the most helpful things to help humanity prosper.”
Rather than abandoning the mission, Altman said he considered it his “duty” to uphold OpenAI’s mission, as he simultaneously made the company more attractive for investors so that it could compete with deeper-pocketed rivals like xAI.
Appearing to further discredit Musk’s motivations in filing the lawsuit, Altman also said that Musk was “extremely sensitive” about his “personal reputation” and “felt like he was not getting enough of the credit for OpenAI.” Casting the lawsuit as a bid to control OpenAI from the outside, Altman said that he valued Musk’s contributions but that he “absolutely” disagreed that OpenAI’s early success could be attributed more to Musk than his own involvement or the work of OpenAI’s pioneering teams.
Through the litigation, OpenAI has accused Musk of taking too much credit for OpenAI’s success. Notably, Musk’s expert supposedly dismissed the scientists and programmers who invented ChatGPT as having “contributed zero percent of the nonprofit’s current value,” OpenAI has alleged.
Star-studded witness list
Musk and Altman will likely testify for more than two hours each, alongside other top tech leaders likely to be called as witnesses for the trial.
Brockman is scheduled to take the stand for 2.5 hours and possibly longer, while co-defendant Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is slated for one hour.
Sutskever is also on the witness list, where he was given a 30-minute slot, as is Shivon Zilis, one of Musk’s associates and the mother of four of his children. Zilis may be a key witness, since Altman foolishly confided in her. During his deposition, Altman called Zilis an “Elon whisperer,” while emphasizing that he was not aware of her personal relationship with Musk during the time or else he would not have turned to her for guidance on how to navigate the rocky relationship.
The trial could stretch for four weeks, and no witness will receive special treatment, Gonzalez Rogers said in an order requiring that all witnesses use the court’s front door to enter the proceedings. That should make for interesting photo ops as Silicon Valley insiders prepare for the trial to reveal more “juicy gossip,” NBC News reported.
For Musk, the buildup to the trial may be frustrating, as reports do not count his own AI firm among OpenAI’s biggest rivals. Instead, Reuters noted that OpenAI “faces unprecedented competition” from Anthropic—recently valued at $1 trillion—while reporting that xAI “trails far behind OpenAI in usage.” Similarly, NBC News cited Anthropic and Google as OpenAI’s biggest rivals.
During Musk’s deposition, OpenAI’s lawyers revealed a likely tactic in fighting against Musk’s lawsuit. They asked Musk if he even still considered AGI to be an “existential threat,” considering that he operates an AI firm that, unlike OpenAI, no longer aspires to be structured as a “public benefit corporation.”
“It has a risk,” Musk testified, as he seems unwilling to acknowledge any contradiction in his own decision to start a for-profit AI company.
Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.
