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. Musk has asked the court to award any damages to OpenAI’s nonprofit rather than to him personally.
Nine jurors will deliver an advisory verdict, a non-binding recommendation, to guide the judge in deciding Musk’s claims against Altman. Musk, Altman, and Brockman will take the stand. Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella are also expected to testify. Cringey texts, raw diary entries, and endless scheming behind the founding and growth of OpenAI are expected to come to light.
In an industry enveloped in secrecy, the trial will be 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.
What are they fighting about?
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. (MIT Technology Review was first to report on OpenAI’s internal conflicts around its mission.)
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. When Musk threatened to stop funding, Altman and Brockman told him that they were committed to keeping the company a nonprofit. Musk alleges that they pursued plans to pivot to a for-profit without sufficiently informing him. According to OpenAI, Musk agreed that the company needed a for-profit entity and even wanted to be its CEO.
