A hearing on Musk’s lawsuit against Altman could result in financial damages and, more importantly, a governance change at OpenAI that could complicate its plans for an initial public offering as early as this year.
As the first witness on the stand, Musk immediately sought to present his case as more than just OpenAI. Taking Altman’s side would “give license to plunder every charity in America” and “shake the entire foundation of charitable giving,” Musk told a panel of nine jurors who were advising U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on how to rule.
“Ever since he was a young man in college, Musk has been concerned about computers becoming smarter than people,” Musk’s attorney Steven Molloy told jurors. Mollo reported that Musk lobbied governments to pass regulations addressing the possibility of so-called artificial general intelligence, including meeting with then-President Barack Obama in 2015. “But the government was not taking action,” Molo said. “Elon felt he had to do something.”
Around the same time, Musk met Altman, a 30-year-old investor “whom he didn’t know very well,” Mollo said. They soon launched OpenAI together as a non-profit. Google’s uncontrolled progress on AI development had created concerns for both co-founders of OpenAI, and they wanted to create a competing lab with a greater focus on security. “I approach [OpenAI] Exists because Larry Page called me a speciesist for being pro-humanity,” Musk said, referring to the Google co-founder. “What would be the opposite of Google? An open source non-profit.”
While Musk believes AI can cure diseases and create prosperity for humanity, he also told the court he thinks the technology could turn into catastrophic scenarios straight out of science fiction. “It could kill us all… Terminator outcome. I think we want to be in a movie… like star trekNot a James Cameron movie,” Musk said. (Although Musk has long raised concerns about AI security, his current firm, XAI, has been criticized by researchers at other AI labs for a “reckless” security culture.)
According to Mollo, as OpenAI began to achieve some of its successes, Musk and Altman agreed that a profitable branch with fixed returns for investors was necessary to raise the extraordinary amount of money needed for hiring and computing. He compared it to a non-profit museum that receives some income from a for-profit store. “I was not opposed to small profits as long as the tail wags the dog,” Musk said on the stand.
Musk felt the approach had gone too far when Microsoft, another defendant in the lawsuit, agreed to invest $10 billion in 2023, and OpenAI rapidly transferred intellectual property and employees to the for-profit company. “The museum store sold the Picassos, so they were closed so no one could see them,” Mollo said.
OpenAI’s denial
OpenAI attorney William Savitt told jurors that OpenAI never promised Musk that it would remain a nonprofit and publish all of its code. “The evidence here will show that what Musk says did not happen,” Savitt said.
He said Musk was aware of the plan to raise corporate investment of more than $10 billion in 2018 itself. Musk also raised concerns about Microsoft’s involvement in a 2020 tweet. But he didn’t file a lawsuit until he founded a competitor, XAI, in 2023.
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