The lawyers served the closing arguments in Musk’s lawsuit against Altman on Thursday in a last-ditch attempt to convince a judge and jury that their clients, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, have the best intentions and are telling the truth in the nonprofit founding mission of OpenAI. The ruling could be handed down as soon as next week, ending a decade-long battle between two of the most influential entrepreneurs in the tech industry.
But regardless of the outcome, there are many losers in this case. A huge body of evidence shows that those worst off are the workers, policymakers, and members of the public who believed in the nonprofit research lab’s mission and therefore supported OpenAI. What seemed like a precedent for Musk and the other OpenAI co-founders at almost every step was building the world leading An artificial intelligence lab – even if it meant creating a multi-billion-dollar for-profit company.
“It’s hard to understand how the public interest is protected by either side, and that’s really what this nonprofit case is ultimately about,” said Jill Horwitz, a law professor at Northwestern University who specializes in nonprofits and innovation, who heard closing arguments. “The public interest of nonprofit organizations is at risk regardless of who wins.”
OpenAI’s stated mission is to bring the benefits of artificial general intelligence (AGI) to humanity, but humanity is not a party to this matter. In practice, OpenAI has spent the last decade trying to compete with multi-trillion-dollar companies like Google and build AGI first. Additionally, Musk and Altman fought fiercely to gain control of OpenAI.
“Musk and Altman are basically in a race to be the first to build superintelligence, and both are rightly afraid of what the other will do if he wins. The rest of us should be afraid of both of them,” says Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher who joined the team in 2022 and has expressed concerns about the company’s security culture. He was part of a group of former OpenAI researchers that submitted the application amicus brief in this case against converting OpenAI into a for-profit business, arguing that its nonprofit structure was key to its decision to join the company.
During the trial, the nonprofit OpenAI was talked about as if it were just another corporate investor. OpenAI’s lawyers argued that giving the nonprofit organization $200 billion of shares in a for-profit company was proof that OpenAI was fulfilling its mission. Community organizations disagree that funding alone is sufficient.
“I’m one of many people who are happy to see how many philanthropic resources the OpenAI Foundation has at its disposal to do good work,” says Nathan Calvin, vice president of state affairs at the AI security nonprofit Encode, which submitted the application amicus brief opposing OpenAI’s previous restructuring on this matter. “However, it is worth remembering that a non-profit also has a governance role and that the mission of the non-profit is not that of a typical foundation, but specifically to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. Money is important for this purpose and is useful in all other cases, but it is not an end in itself.”
Origin story
Evidence revealed in the case suggests that Altman and Musk were in agreement to launch OpenAI as a nonprofit organization and operate much like a typical startup. The common goal was to beat Google DeepMind in the race to AGI. But establishing OpenAI as a nonprofit turned out to be a terribly inconvenient way to win this race.
Musk accused Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, and Greg Brockman, the organization’s co-founder and president, of straying from the nonprofit’s founding mission. He claims the founders used his $38 million investment to turn OpenAI into an $850 billion company, with several of its co-founders becoming billionaires.