Elon Musk and Sam Altman are going to court over OpenAI’s future
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
After a yearslong legal feud, Elon Musk and Open AI CEO Sam Altman are heading to trial this week in Northern California in a case that could have sweeping consequences. Ahead of Open AI’s highly anticipated IPO, the court could rule on whether the company is allowed to exist as a for-profit enterprise and might even oust its current executive leadership, including Altman. Musk is suing Open AI, alleging that Altman and Open AI president Greg Brockman deceived him into bankrolling the company in its early days by promising to maintain it as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI that benefits humanity, only to later restructure the company to operate a for-profit subsidiary. Musk cofounded OpenAI with Altman and others in 2015, but he left in 2018 after a bitter power struggle. Musk is seeking as much as $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s biggest financial backers. He is also asking the court to remove Altman and Brockman from their roles and to restore OpenAI as a nonprofit. Musk has asked the court to award any damages to OpenAI’s nonprofit rather than to him personally. Nine jurors will deliver an advisory verdict, a non-binding recommendation, to guide the judge in deciding Musk’s claims against Altman. Musk, Altman, and Brockman will take the stand. Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella are also expected to testify. Cringey texts, raw diary entries, and endless scheming behind the founding and growth of OpenAI are expected to come to light. In an industry enveloped in secrecy, the trial will be a rare opportunity for the public to look behind the curtain and find out what’s going on in the companies creating the most transformative technology ever built. What are they fighting about? When OpenAI was originally founded as a nonprofit, backed by a $38 million donation from Musk, the company vowed to create open-source technology for the public’s benefit, unconstrain