Musk alleges that Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, betrayed the founding mission of OpenAI, which the two men co-founded in 2015 as a non-profit organization devoted to developing AI for the benefit of humanity as a whole.
On the docket — OpenAI has since restructured into a for-profit company, a move that Musk alleges is a breach of charitable trust relating to the roughly $38 million he donated to OpenAI in its earliest days. He has also accused Altman and OpenAI’s President, Greg Brockman, of unjust enrichment. (This month, Musk dropped a third allegation from the suit, that he had been fraudulently misled about OpenAI’s plans to convert to a for-profit.) OpenAI’s lawyers argue that Musk’s suit is baseless, and motivated by a competitive desire to stifle OpenAI’s position in the AI race. Musk runs a competitor to OpenAI, xAI, which he recently subsumed into his rocket company SpaceX.
On the stand — The trial, which is expected to last until late May barring any last-minute settlement, will feature potentially explosive witness testimony from some of the biggest names in AI, including Musk, Altman, Brockman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, is also scheduled to testify. Discovery has already yielded thousands of pages of documents, including diary entries and emails from OpenAI’s early years, as well as new details of Altman’s brief ouster as CEO in 2023.