Are Elon Musk and OpenAI Fighting an AI Arms Race? Sam Altman’s Lawyers Think So

As Elon Musk’s dayslong testimony in his case against OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman came to a close Thursday, defense attorneys aimed to paint the world’s richest man as intent on dominating artificial intelligence — not on protecting the world from it.

Under cross-examination in an Oakland court, attorneys for Altman and Microsoft, the company’s largest financial backer and which until this week held the exclusive rights to license and sell its technology, held Musk’s feet to the fire about a number of business moves he’s made — both within and outside of OpenAI — that might give jurors pause about whether he operated so differently from his former colleagues in the race to dominate the field.

During hours of testimony, Musk has told the court that he cofounded the nonprofit OpenAI with Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman in 2015 altruistically, fearing the dangers of AI and wanting to ensure that the technology was developed in a safe and open-source way. He brought the suit, he said, after deciding that his co-founders had betrayed that intention — expanding the company into a tech behemoth valued at $852 billion today.

But Microsoft attorney Russell Cohen seemed to point to a different motivation: a desire to beat OpenAI and win the AI race.

“You didn’t sue Microsoft [and OpenAI] until November 2024, correct?” Cohen said.

“Yes,” Musk said.

“And that is after you formed your own AI company, xAI, correct?” Cohen said.

“Yes,” Musk said.

The questions came after William Savitt, Altman’s attorney, directed the jury’s attention to a bombshell message Musk sent to Mark Zuckerberg in February 2025, asking whether the Meta CEO would be “open to the idea of bidding on the OpenAI IP,” or intellectual property, with Musk and others.

The jury also learned that xAI had partially “distilled,” that is, derived technology from OpenAI’s own models, which violates OpenAI’s terms of service.

The pointed inquiries on Thursday came after Musk’s testimony started to bring the events of how OpenAI launched its first for-profit subsidiary into focus. In 2017, executives including Altman, Musk, Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, a top computer scientist at the company since its founding, launched discussions about creating a for-profit subsidiary.

It would be, they said, a way to bring in additional funding and keep at the cutting edge of a growing field of competitors as they started pursuing artificial general intelligence — commonly referred to as AGI — a futuristic superintelligent AI technology.

Altman’s defense has alleged that throughout that process, Musk attempted to “wrest control” of the company twice, first insisting that he hold a majority equity stake in any for-profit entity, control its board of directors and serve as CEO, and later, that OpenAI be folded into Tesla, where he already serves as CEO.

Savitt said Musk began withholding $5 million quarterly fund contributions to put pressure on the company to grant his requests, and after those attempts failed, he left the company.

Savitt also accused Musk of poaching OpenAI employees as Musk exited in early 2018, including founding member Andrej Karpathy, for Tesla.

Musk said multiple times that Tesla is not pursuing AGI. But in March, Musk wrote on the social media platform X that “Tesla will be one of the companies to make AGI and probably the first to make it in humanoid/atom-shaping form.”

Separately, he formed xAI in 2023, which he said is pursuing AGI.

He’s downplayed its competitiveness with OpenAI, though, testifying that it has just a couple hundred employees and a “small market share.”

“I would say technically competitive, but much smaller than OpenAI,” Musk said Tuesday.

The three days of Musk’s testimony got testy at times, particularly during Savitt’s cross-examination on Wednesday afternoon, when Savitt and U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers asked Musk repeatedly to answer the questions he was asked. Musk accused Savitt of intentionally misleading him.

But the most heated moment thus far might have come before the jury was called to the courtroom on Thursday morning, during a discussion about what AI safety expert Stuart Russell, who is taking the stand this afternoon, will be willing to testify to.

Musk’s attorney argued he should be allowed to speak about the climate risk associated with AI, saying: “We could all die.”

“It is also ironic that your client, despite these risks, is creating a company in the exact space,” Gonzalez Rogers said. “I suspect that there are people who don’t want to put the future in Mr. Musk’s hands.”