Sam Altman defends himself as a ‘honest and trustworthy businessperson’ in trial testimony detailing his past dealings with Elon Musk

Open AI CEO Sam Altman took the witness stand Tuesday to defend his business record in a trial pitting him against Elon Musk, rebutting testimony that disparaged his leadership at a pivotal time for the Chat GPT maker. Musk, the world’s richest man, is seeking Altman’s ouster from the company leadership as part of a civil lawsuit accusing him of betraying their shared vision for Open AI. Since its start as a nonprofit funded primarily by Musk, Open AI has evolved into a capitalistic venture now valued at $852 billion. More than two weeks into the trial in a federal courthouse in Oakland, California, neither of the tech titans has emerged as an overly sympathetic character. But nobody has more to lose than Altman. Even if Musk loses the case, the trial has invited further scrutiny of Altman’s leadership at a crucial time for the company and its competition with Musk’s own AI firm and another rival, Anthropic, formed by a group of seven ex-OpenAI leaders. All three firms are moving toward planned initial public offerings that are expected to be some of the largest ever. Under a barrage of questions by a lawyer for Musk, Altman said he did not agree with trial testimony that depicted him as dishonest. “I believe I am an honest and trustworthy businessperson,” Altman said. A jury that’s already heard about Altman’s character from a parade of his former allies and adversaries will ultimately decide the verdict. But the repercussions could reverberate widely. “This is not looking good for any of them, and I think that that’s a little bit unfortunate for the AI industry at a time when the public perception of AI is quite negative and seems to be getting worse,” said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute. Testimony about Altman has been a font of social media memes The lawsuit accuses Altman and his top lieutenant, Greg Brockman, of double-crossing Musk by straying from the San Francisco company’s founding mission to be an altruistic steward of a r