Elon Musk faces OpenAI trial

A nine-person jury was seated in Oakland on April 27, and opening arguments in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman began Tuesday. (cnbc.com) (money.usnews.com) Musk says OpenAI broke its founding promise by shifting from a nonprofit research lab into a profit-seeking company. He sued in 2024 after leaving OpenAI in 2018 and later launching rival artificial intelligence company xAI in 2023. (cnbc.com) Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed Musk’s fraud claims on April 24 at his request, but kept the case moving on breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment claims. (finance.yahoo.com) The jury’s role is limited. Gonzalez Rogers split the trial into a liability phase and a remedies phase, and the jurors’ verdict in the first phase will be advisory rather than binding. (cnbc.com) Musk’s lawyers said in January that OpenAI’s “wrongful gains” could total as much as $134 billion, and he has said any recovery should go back to OpenAI’s nonprofit rather than to him personally. (cnbc.com 1) (cnbc.com 2) OpenAI has called the case “baseless” and described it as a campaign driven by Musk’s rivalry with the company. Altman and Musk have also traded personal insults in public posts as the trial approached. (cnbc.com) The case reaches back to OpenAI’s 2015 founding, when Musk, Altman and others created it as a nonprofit and Musk contributed $38 million, according to MIT Technology Review. (technologyreview.com) OpenAI later created a for-profit subsidiary to raise the money needed to build advanced artificial intelligence systems, after executives concluded the original structure could not fund the work. (technologyreview.com) Musk, Altman and Brockman are expected to testify, along with former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, former chief technology officer Mira Murati and Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella. (technologyreview.com) The liability phase is expected to run until May 21. By then, the court will have heard not just a feud between two tech billionaires, but a detailed record of how OpenAI changed from a nonprofit lab into one of the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence companies. (cnbc.com)