The second week of a blockbuster trial between Elon Musk and Sam Altman kicks off Monday, with the future of OpenAI very much up for grabs.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman is expected to testify Monday, the next star witness in a revolving cast of some of the most important leaders in AI.
Over three days of testimony and cross-examination last week, Musk sought to make his case to nine jurors that he was manipulated by OpenAI and Altman into giving $38 million to a nonprofit, only for the startup to turn it into a for-profit venture.
The Tesla and SpaceX owner is asking the court to remove Altman and Brockman from their leadership roles at OpenAI, damages of up to $180 billion to be paid out from OpenAI’s for-profit arm to its nonprofit parent, and an unwinding of the company’s recent conversion to a more traditional corporate governance structure.
If even one of these remedies is granted, it could change the course of OpenAI and the rest of the artificial-intelligence industry with it.
Brockman and who else?
Musk’s attorneys have pointed to private journal entries written by Brockman, obtained as part of legal discovery, to support the argument that the OpenAI founders were secretly plotting about the company’s for-profit structure.
“We’ve been thinking that maybe we should just flip to a for profit,” Brockman allegedly wrote in a private journal entry in 2017. “Making the money for us sounds great and all.”
He later said in a recorded deposition in September that the entry in question was “a reference to having some sort of a revenue plan…in order to pursue the mission” of OpenAI.
As Brockman takes the stand, it is expected that Musk’s legal team will reference those personal notes to support Musk’s perspective that the OpenAI founders were scheming about the for-profit plan while receiving donations from him.
Other witnesses expected to take the stand include Altman, Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella, former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, as well as Shivon Zilis, former OpenAI board member and mother to four of Musk’s’ children.
What have we learned so far?
Musk has made a number of admissions regarding his fledgling AI company, xAI. He has repeatedly described xAI, which was acquired by his other company SpaceX in February, as a “very small company” that is one-tenth the size of OpenAI.
In his Thursday testimony, Musk—unprompted by attorneys—began ranking the leading AI companies and slighted OpenAI along the way.
“Anthropic would currently be number one,” said Musk. “OpenAI would be the second biggest. Google would probably be the third biggest. The Chinese open source models would probably be fourth, and then xAI would be fifth.”
During a tense cross-examination, attorneys for OpenAI asked Musk whether xAI has “distilled” OpenAI’s technology. Distillation in AI means a process in which an AI model learns from an existing one by asking it hundreds of thousands of questions. It has been alleged that DeepSeek, a Chinese model, did this with bigger AI models to become one of the leading AI models in the world.
“Well, generally, the AI companies have distilled other AI companies’ models,” said Musk.
“So that’s a yes?” asked William Savitt, lead attorney for OpenAI. “Partly,” replied Musk.
What else did the trial cover?
Musk and his longtime fixer, Jared Birchall—who typically avoids the spotlight—were both questioned about incorporation papers that were filed in 2017 to create a for-profit benefit corporation for OpenAI. This is significant in large part because Musk has sought to express to the jury that Altman and Brockman effectively stole a charity by turning it into a for-profit company.
During Birchall’s testimony on Thursday, text messages between Birchall and Zilis appeared on TV screens in which Zilis wrote, “Heads up. Seems like Greg [Brockman], Ilya [Sutskever], Elon a go on for-profit.”
Musk testified earlier in the week that while he did instruct Birchall to file the paperwork, it was just “in case it was needed, but it turned out not to be.”