OpenAI accuses Musk

OpenAI says Elon Musk changed the finish line of his lawsuit just weeks before trial, after spending months arguing that the company betrayed its original nonprofit mission. In a Friday filing, OpenAI called the late switch a “legal ambush” because Musk’s new demands would force the case to revolve around different evidence, different witnesses, and different remedies right before an April 27 trial date. (bloomberg.com) The new demands are much bigger than a damages claim. Bloomberg reported that Musk now wants any money he wins sent to OpenAI’s nonprofit arm, wants OpenAI’s corporate conversion unwound, and wants court oversight of financings and transactions tied to that restructuring. (bloomberg.com) Earlier in the same week, Musk also asked for Sam Altman to be removed as OpenAI chief executive and from the nonprofit board, and for Greg Brockman to be removed from his officer role. That turned a fight about OpenAI’s structure into a fight about who gets to run it. (cnbc.com) This case started with a much older argument. Musk helped found OpenAI in December 2015 as a nonprofit, and he has said the company later broke that original promise by moving toward a profit-seeking structure and taking major backing from Microsoft. (time.com, bloomberg.com) OpenAI’s answer is that Musk is rewriting history. In a public post from 2024, OpenAI said Musk himself pushed for a for-profit structure in 2017, wanted majority equity and control, and left after that plan failed. (openai.com) That history matters because OpenAI is not a normal startup with one clean ownership line. The organization began as a nonprofit, later built a capped-profit structure to raise larger sums, and is now fighting over another restructuring at the same time artificial intelligence models are getting more expensive to train and deploy. (time.com, openai.com) The dollar figure hanging over the case is huge because the company is huge. One court filing described OpenAI as a business valued around $157 billion, and news coverage of the April 2026 trial has framed the fight as involving more than $100 billion in potential corporate stakes. (cdn.arstechnica.net, bloomberg.com) OpenAI has been escalating outside the courtroom too. On April 6, CNBC reported that the company asked the California and Delaware attorneys general to investigate what it called Musk’s “improper and anti-competitive behavior” ahead of trial. (cnbc.com) That accusation points at the business reality underneath the legal one. Musk now runs xAI, a direct OpenAI competitor, so every court order that slows OpenAI’s restructuring or destabilizes its leadership could also affect the race between two companies building the same kind of frontier artificial intelligence systems. (openai.com, cnbc.com) So the “ambush” fight is really about timing and leverage. If the judge lets Musk pursue these late-added remedies, the April 27 trial in federal court in Oakland could become a referendum not just on what OpenAI promised in 2015, but on who controls one of the most valuable artificial intelligence companies in the world in 2026. (bloomberg.com, timesnownews.com)