Elon Musk and On Tuesday, Sam Altman appeared together in a federal courtroom for the first time as they fought over OpenAI’s decade-long evolution and what it means for the company’s future.
The trial in Musk’s lawsuit against Altman could result in financial damage and, more importantly, changes in OpenAI’s management that could complicate plans for an initial public offering as soon as this year.
As the first witness on the stand, Musk immediately sought to present his case as more than just an OpenAI issue. Sideing with Altman “will give license to plunder every charity in America” and shake up “the entire foundation of charity,” Musk told a panel of nine jurors advising U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on how to govern.
Musk has been concerned about computers becoming smarter than humans “since he was a young man in college,” his lawyer Steven Molo told jurors. Molo explained that Musk lobbied governments to adopt regulations regarding the prospect of the so-called artificial general intelligence, which included a meeting with then-President Barack Obama in 2015. “But the government didn’t step up,” Molo said. “Elon felt he had to do something.”
Around the same time, Musk met with Altman, then a 30-year-old investor “who he didn’t know very well,” Molo said. They soon launched OpenAI together as a nonprofit. Google’s unchecked progress in artificial intelligence made both OpenAI co-founders concerned, and they wanted to create a competitive lab with a greater emphasis on security. “My perspective is this [OpenAI] exists because Larry Page called me a speciesist for being pro-human,” Musk said, referring to the Google co-founder. “What would be the opposite of Google? An open-source nonprofit.”
While Musk believes artificial intelligence can cure diseases and bring prosperity to humanity, he also told the court that he believes the technology could turn into catastrophic scenarios straight out of science fiction. “It could also kill us all… Terminator result. I think we’d like to be in a movie… for example Star Treknot a James Cameron movie,” Musk said. (Though Musk has long raised the alarm about AI security, his current company, xAI, criticized by researchers from other AI labs due to a “reckless” security culture).
According to Molo, as OpenAI began to see some success, Musk and Altman agreed that to raise the extraordinary amounts of money needed to fund employment and IT, it was necessary to create a for-profit arm that would provide investors with consistent returns. He compared it to a nonprofit museum that receives some revenue from a for-profit store. “I wasn’t opposed to there being a small for-profit company, as long as the tail didn’t wag the dog,” Musk said at the booth.
Musk found that approach went too far when Microsoft, another defendant in the lawsuit, agreed to invest $10 billion in 2023 and OpenAI increasingly transferred intellectual property and staff to the for-profit company. “The museum store sold the Picassos, so they locked them up where no one could see them,” Molo said.
Taking down OpenAI
William Savitt, a lawyer for OpenAI, told jurors that OpenAI never promised Musk it would remain a nonprofit and publish all of its code. “The evidence will show that what Musk claims did not happen,” Savitt said.
He added that Musk knew about plans to raise corporate investment above $10 billion already in 2018. Musk even expressed concerns about Microsoft’s involvement in tweet from 2020. But he didn’t file a lawsuit until he founded a competitor, xAI, in 2023.