Lawyers for Elon Musk and Sam Altman Make Their Final Case in OpenAI Trial

Whether OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other executives betrayed their commitment to building a safe, open-source artificial intelligence, slighting billionaire Elon Musk in the process, will be decided by an Oakland jury and judge.

For weeks, the tech executives have sparred in federal court over whether the startup, first proposed by Altman to Musk as a sort of AI “Manhattan Project,” has abandoned its original mission to enrich themselves. Musk, who provided $38 million in early funding, has accused his former OpenAI co-founders Altman and Greg Brockman of “stealing a charity.”

OpenAI’s executives, on the other hand, have said Musk only sued after he brought his own AI competitor, xAI, onto the market.

During his closing statement, Musk’s lead counsel, Steven Molo, focused on Altman’s credibility. He asked the jury to consider hypothetically what they would do if they came upon a bridge, suspended 150 feet above a river, and built on Altman’s “version of the truth.”

“Would you walk across that bridge?” He asked. “I don’t think many people would.”

Molo said that in the early years of OpenAI, the intent was to create a technology “for the good of the world.” He pointed to Musk’s early fears of the dangers of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, an early mission statement that said OpenAI would not be constrained by a need to generate financial return and correspondence between Altman and Musk that expressed support by both of them for a nonprofit structure and safety-focused mission.

“There was no disagreement over the core mission,” Molo said.

But, he said, since OpenAI launched a for-profit subsidiary in 2019 — after Musk departed — Altman and his fellow executives have treated the nonprofit as a “shell,” transferring intellectual property and the vast majority of employees to the for-profit arm of the company. In 2023, Molo continued, after OpenAI made a $10 billion deal with Microsoft, the company failed to prioritize safety, abandoned its commitment to open sourcing and “enriched investors and insiders.”

“They’re motivated by money: Microsoft and Altman,” Molo said.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that the company had invested $13 billion and expects to see a return of about $92 billion. Molo also pointed out that other executives, including Brockman and founding OpenAI computer scientist Ilya Sutskever, testified to having billions in equity, despite not investing in the company.

Altman’s attorneys argued that Musk’s case was baseless: not only was Molo’s characterization false, but they argued, the larger issue is that Musk’s contributions to OpenAI — in the form of rent payments, Tesla Model 3 cars and $25 million in quarterly donations — were never accompanied by specific promises for their use.

“If the donations came with no strings attached, then Mr. Musk does not have a charitable trust to enforce,” Sarah Eddy, an attorney for OpenAI’s defendants, said.

She and Altman’s lead counsel, William Savitt, also spent much of their closing arguments painting Musk as not wanting to protect humanity from AGI, as he’s suggested, but wanting to be the one who controls it.

They allege Musk brought his suit after he tried to wrest control of a potential for-profit arm of OpenAI, and later absorb the organization into Tesla, in 2017. The executives had begun discussing a for-profit expansion that year to solicit more funding for top talent and “compute” to compete with other industry leaders.

Musk departed OpenAI in February 2018, after a falling-out with the other executives over those discussions.

Shortly after, OpenAI decided to introduce a for-profit public benefit corporation. It has since become a $850 billion company, and is considering an initial public offering estimated at up to a trillion dollars.

OpenAI’s attorneys alleged that Musk saw OpenAI’s skyrocketing success and filed his suit to destroy a competitor in the field.

“The truth is that Mr. Musk wanted a for-profit AI, and he wanted to dominate it,” Eddy said.

The jury is set to begin deliberations Monday. If they side with Musk, OpenAI and Microsoft could owe $150 billion in damages to be redirected to the non-profit foundation, along with a court order dismantling OpenAI’s for-profit structure and removal of Altman and Brockman from their posts.

The jury will not have the final say, though. In a rare, but not unprecedented, move, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rodgers will have the ultimate right to rule on the claims.

According to Charlie Bullock, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Law and AI, this is because most times, “equitable claims” — breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment — which involve non-monetary remedies, are decided by a judge.

In this case, Gonzalez Rodgers elected to have an advisory jury, and Bullock said that typically, judges choose to go along with their decision.