Winners & losers: The trial over Elon Musk's claims that OpenAI "looted a charity" is also a dispute over who controls the future of advanced AI and how it is funded. At stake is whether frontier systems like GPT-4 and its successors are developed under nonprofit-style constraints or driven primarily by commercial incentives. A federal judge will ultimately decide which interpretation best aligns with OpenAI's founding documents and internal records.
Jury selection in the case began this week in US District Court in Northern California. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers will ultimately decide whether OpenAI's shift to a capped-profit structure – and its close partnership with Microsoft – breached a charitable trust that Elon Musk says arose from roughly $38 million he donated to the lab's early work. Jurors will weigh liability and, if it reaches that stage, damages, but their role is advisory; the judge will have the final say in both phases of the trial.
The core dispute turns on how OpenAI's founders intended to balance open research against the enormous compute, data, and engineering demands of building artificial general intelligence. In early 2015 emails, Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discussed a structure "so that the tech belongs to the world via some sort of nonprofit, but the people working on it get startup-like compensation if it works." They were already trying to reconcile public-benefit governance with the need to recruit scarce AI talent and fund GPU-intensive research.
Later exchanges show Musk reminding Altman that he would not "fund something that goes in what turns out to be the wrong direction," while Altman described Musk as the "main inspiration" behind the governance discussions that shaped the organization's original structure.
Those early plans later gave way to a power struggle as the technical agenda and the potential impact of artificial general intelligence came into sharper focus. By early 2016, Elon Musk was meeting weekly with OpenAI's leadership to discuss "OpenAI's long-term success" and agreed to increase his donations as the team ramped up research, eventually gifting Teslas to co-founders in recognition of "what they had done to get OpenAI to where it is today."
Within a year, however, co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever were warning in internal emails that the proposed structure would give Musk "unilateral absolute control over the AGI," and that once the company was on track toward AGI, "the company will be much more important than any individual." They also questioned Altman's insistence on the CEO title, asking whether AGI was truly his "primary motivation" and how it aligned with his broader ambitions.
Those documents, including a 2017 diary entry in which Brockman wrote, "This is the only chance we have to get out from Elon," are expected to feature heavily at trial. Musk's lawyers argue that his contributions created a binding obligation to keep OpenAI nonprofit and open, and that the 2019 creation of a for-profit entity – now valued at about $852 billion after a recent funding round – violated that commitment and could pave the way for a future IPO.
OpenAI counters that Musk's funding was a standard charitable donation, not an investment, and that its capped-profit structure is the only realistic way to finance the infrastructure required to compete with rivals such as Anthropic and Google.
The technical safety narrative runs through both sides' testimony. Musk told lawyers that he avoided launching an AI company until 2023 because he feared the "double-edged sword of AI would do more harm or more good." He said his early view that "the danger of an apocalypse was too great" later proved "naïve" once he concluded that others would build artificial general intelligence whether he participated or not.
Altman, who describes himself as a "sci-fi nerd" who grew up believing advanced AI would be "one of the coolest things that humanity could ever build," characterizes the lawsuit as an attempt by a late-entering competitor – xAI, Musk's AI company, now integrated into SpaceX – to slow a rival while pursuing similar for-profit ambitions in its own orbital-compute strategy.
With billions of dollars in potential damages and OpenAI's structure at stake, the case has drawn a star-studded witness list that includes Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Satya Nadella, and other figures who helped turn large language models from research curiosities into a core platform for cloud and consumer products.
However it ends, the trial will offer a rare glimpse into how some of the industry's most influential technologists think about AGI risk, control over model weights, and the governance structures they believe are compatible with running frontier-scale AI systems.