Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s court battle over the future of OpenAI – The Verge

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  That’s a wrap!

  We’re done for the day.

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  YGR scolds OpenAI for taking inconsistent positions on the origin of its name.

  “You seem to suggest OpenAI did not refer to open source,” YGR says. But that may conflict with what was said in another case. “I would suggest you talk to Quinn Emanuel and perhaps look at the prosecution history” about the origin of the name. “Do not take inconsistent positions in front of me.”

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  Arguments over ownership.

  Musk and his attorney are going over emails about the equity split at OpenAI. Musk describes his cofounders’ demands for a four-way split as “unfair,” saying “it wouldn’t make sense to create a company that has an equal split — if one of the founders is also providing all the money.” He wanted a larger ownership stake that would dilute over time, he says, partly to make sure OpenAI was going in a direction he considered safe.

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  Apparently OpenAI could have had an ICO.

  Musk describes various plans that the group batted around for making money at OpenAI, including a “small adjunct” for-profit and other ideas. “One of the ideas that was proposed was a cryptocoin issuance — but I was against that because it sounded kinda scammy,” Musk says.

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  “I was not averse to a small for-profit,” Musk says.

  Musk tells the court that “at various times we discussed, we brainstormed about different ways to fund the charity,” including a for-profit structure. “We did talk about establishing a for-profit or Tesla providing some of the funding — there were a bunch of ideas that were brainstormed — I was not averse to a small for-profit that would provide funding to the nonprofit as long as the tail didn’t wag the dog.” These were “informal verbal conversations and email and text discussions” between Musk, Brockman, Altman, and Sutskever, he recalls.

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  We’re reading emails between Musk and Jensen Huang.

  Musk is trying to establish how instrumental he was to getting Huang and Nvidia to supply OpenAI with hardware. “I was asking Jensen for access to the first AI supercomputers they were making,” he says — referring to Nvidia’s DGX lineup — as an exhibit of a 2016 email conversation enters the record. “This was the first AI supercomputer ever developed and it would make a huge difference to OpenAI if we could get one … I wanted to be clear with Jensen that this was — I’m emailing from my Tesla email here, but I wanted to be clear this is not a Tesla request.” The conversation shows Huang promised “I will make sure OAI is one of the first ones” to get one.

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  Musk says nonprofit was non-negotiable for OpenAI.

  “I came up with the idea, the name, recruited the key people, taught them everything I know, provided all the initial funding, besides that nothing,” he says (to a few chuckles in the courtroom). “It was specifically meant to be a charity that does not benefit any individual person. I could have chosen to start it as a for-profit and I chose not to.” He calls himself “instrumental in recruiting Ilya Sutskever and most of the initial team.”

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  We’re at the founding of OpenAI.

  Through email exhibits and testimony, Musk emphasizes he believed OpenAI would be a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that would “aim to bring in more money than it spends, and in doing so, that becomes cash reserves or savings” for the charity. “I was fundamentally involved” in the announcement, he says — “reviewed and drafted part of the announcement, reviewed the webpage, and did media interviews and whatnot.” Throughout this, he indicates, Musk thought he and Altman were on the same page.

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  Musk says he would have created something like OpenAI on his own.

  “To be clear I would have created a nonprofit open source foundation with or without Sam Altman or [OpenAI cofounder] Greg Brockman, but at the time I was glad they were doing so with me,” he says. The name came about “as the result of discussions with Greg, Sam, and Ilya [Sutskever]. We bounced around a few different names, the one I thought made sense was OpenAI because the ‘open’ in OpenAI represents open source.” (A lack of open source releases, of course, is one of Musk’s bones to pick with OpenAI.)

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  Musk recalls meeting Sam Altman.

  Musk says Altman, then at YCombinator, was “not well-known at that time” — but he agreed with Musk on AI safety, which was very important. He reiterates that, by contrast, Larry Page called Musk a “speciesist” for being concerned about humans being wiped out by AI. “OpenAI exists because Larry Page called me a speciesist,” he says.

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  Sam Altman left during a break, but Elon Musk’s lawyer didn’t notice.

  Molo went to gesture to Altman to ask if, as he sat there today, safety was important to him. But Altman, who was here for the opening arguments, left afterwards.

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  “Here we are in 2026 and AI is scary smart.”

  Musk continues to talk about the dangers of AI, saying he warned President Barack Obama in a meeting years before it was a serious concern. “There is no agreement to limit AI and so there is currently an AI acceleration that’s happening very quickly with a number of companies primarily in the US and with China,” he says. Back in 2015, he recalls, “I had many dinners with many people talking about AI safety” — one of those people was Sam Altman.

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  “I have extreme concerns about AI,” says Musk.

  He tells the jury that OpenAI exists because of conversations he had with Larry Page of Google, who Musk says did not care sufficiently about the dangers of AI. Musk decided “we’ve got to have some counterpoint to Google,” which at the time was leading in AI research. But Musk says he thought about the technology earlier than that, in the ‘90s, when he believed it could “solve all the diseases and make everyone prosperous, or it could kill us all.”

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  AI will be as smart as ‘any human as soon as next year.’

  After noting that computers and chatbots have gotten “to the point where they feel almost human,” Musk brings up artificial general intelligence or AGI. “AGI is when the AI becomes as smart as any human — arguably smarter than any human, and I think we are getting close to that point my guess is that AI will be probably as smart as any human as soon as next year,” he says.

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  Musk claims he has time for SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and the Boring Company because he works a lot.

  “I work 80 to 100 hours a week,” Musk says. He says he doesn’t take vacations, own vacation homes, or own a yacht. He also spends an awful lot of time posting to X.com, doesn’t he?

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  Musk is telling the jury he (co)founded Tesla.

  “The incorporation docs had been filed but there were no employees or IP at that time, so it depends on people’s perspective, but essentially there were five cofounders of the company and I was one of them,” he says. It’s actually, of course, a matter of legal agreement — here’s a little more background.

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  Neuralink’s long-term goal is… AI?

  Elon Musk says from the stand that Neuralink’s “longterm goal is AI safety in the sense that if we can closely tie the human world to AI… if there’s symbiosis we’re more likely to have a future with AI that’s good for humanity.” Sure!

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  “There need to be things that people are excited about that make life worth living … being out there among the stars can excite everyone.”

  We’re getting into Musk’s later companies — SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and others. Musk says that “there have to be reasons to be excited and inspired by the future” and plays up his difficulties establishing SpaceX, saying that “anyone who was good wouldn’t join us because I was just some internet guy.”

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  A little Musk biography.

  Musk is offering some familiar background about his start in the tech industry, from Zip2 to what would become Paypal. “I believe you shouldn’t ask other people to invest unless you’re going to put your own money in,” he says. He’s not really turning on the charm here — the delivery’s fairly flat.

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  Elon Musk, looking funereal in a black suit with a black tie, says “it’s not okay to steal a charity.”

  He claims that if the jury finds in favor of Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, OpenAI, and Microsoft, “it will become precedent and give precedent to looting every charity in America.”

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  Elon Musk officially began his testimony in the trial he has brought against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and company president Greg Brockman.

  The three were on the initial founding team of OpenAI, with Musk investing up to $38 million early on before the co-founders’ relationship soured over disagreements over company structure and mission, including whether or not OpenAI should be folded into Musk-owned Tesla. Musk walked away and, years later, founded xAI — his own direct competitor to OpenAI, which is now owned by Musk’s SpaceX.

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  We are back from a break.

  Sam Altman did not return, but our first witness has been called: Elon Musk.

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  Elon Musk will be the first witness in Musk v. Altman.

  Elon is going to take the stand; stay tuned. The jury is re-entering the courtroom after listening to arguments from OpenAI and Microsoft, then taking a short break.

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