OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lastly took the stand this morning to defend himself in opposition to his former cofounder Elon Musk’s lawsuit difficult OpenAI’s company construction.
Altman was requested out of the gate what he considered Musk’s allegation that OpenAI’s different founders “stole a charity” once they launched a for-profit subsidiary to market merchandise based mostly on the corporate’s AI fashions.
“It feels troublesome to even wrap my head round that framing,” Altman stated after a number of seconds of silence. “We created one of many largest charities on the planet. This basis is doing unimaginable work and can do rather more.”
Musk’s attorneys have been at pains to level out that OpenAI’s basis, which now has belongings on the order of $200 billion, didn’t have full-time workers till earlier this yr. OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor testified at present that was merely due to the problem of changing OpenAI fairness to money, which was achieved with the group’s most up-to-date restructuring in 2025.
The central query posed by Musk’s attorneys is whether or not the corporate’s dedication to security had been left behind as its business energy grew. However Altman stated that in 2017, throughout a pivotal interval when the founders wrestled with the best way to acquire the funding to energy their AI fashions, Musk’s “particular plans on security made me fear.”
He described a “notably hair-raising second” within the debate when Musk was requested what would occur if he died whereas controlling a hypothetical OpenAI for-profit. In Altman’s telling, Musk stated “possibly OpenAI ought to go to my kids.”
Altman stated that Musk’s give attention to controlling the preliminary for-profit gave him pause as a result of OpenAI was devoted to retaining superior AI out of the fingers of a single particular person, and Altman, together with his expertise operating the outstanding startup accelerator Y Combinator, knew “founders who had management normally didn’t give it up.”
Altman additionally testified that Musk’s administration ways, which could have labored for engineering and manufacturing, did not work at OpenAI.
“I do not suppose Mr. Musk understood the best way to run analysis lab,” Altman stated. “He had demotivated a few of our most key researchers. He had at one level required Greg and Ilya to make a listing of the researchers and listing out their accomplishments and stack rank them and take a chainsaw by way of a bunch. That did large harm for a very long time to the tradition of the group.”
Certainly, Altman solid himself as defending the “sweat fairness” of fellow cofounders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, the 2 individuals successfully operating OpenAI on the time whereas Musk and Altman had different jobs.
After that conflict went unresolved, Musk in the end left OpenAI’s board and began competing AI initiatives at Tesla and his personal AI startup, xAI. However Altman saved in contact with the mercurial businessman, updating him on OpenAI’s work and looking for his funding and recommendation.
OpenAI’s attorneys famous that Musk had been saved updated and requested to take part within the investments that his lawsuits now declare corrupted the non-profit.
Throughout one dialogue of a Microsoft funding into OpenAI in 2018, Altman stated that “not like numerous conferences with Mr. Musk, this was vibes assembly,” the place Musk spent a “lengthy dialog displaying us memes on his telephone.”
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