Elon Musk and Sam Altman are going to court over OpenAI’s future

The trial, set to begin this week in Northern California, marks the culmination of a yearslong legal feud between Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. At stake is the very future of OpenAI, the company behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT, which is valued at over $850 billion and is expected to go public by the end of the year. The court could rule on whether OpenAI is allowed to exist as a for-profit enterprise and might even oust its current executive leadership, including Altman.

Musk is suing OpenAI, alleging that Altman and OpenAI 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. The trial will feature testimony from Musk, Altman, Brockman, former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The court is expected to hear about the inner workings of OpenAI, including cringey texts, raw diary entries, and endless scheming behind the founding and growth of the company.

The case is 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. 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, unconstrained by a need to generate financial returns. But over the years, the company began to believe that intensifying competition could make it dangerous to share how it develops its AI models and that a nonprofit structure could not raise enough money to keep building AI.

The court has already found that in 2017 Altman and Brockman wanted to establish a for-profit arm, while Musk proposed merging OpenAI with his electric-car company, Tesla. Despite the potential consequences, some legal scholars are puzzled over why the judge allowed Musk to bring this claim. “The idea that Elon Musk can sue because he was a donor or used to be on the board is pretty puzzling,” says Jill Horwitz, a law professor who studies nonprofit law at Northwestern University.

California’s attorney general has declined to join Musk’s lawsuit, saying that the office did not see how his action serves the public interest. The outcome of the trial could upend the AI race, with OpenAI’s rival company xAI, which makes the chatbot Grok, expected to go public as early as June.