The Archive

Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI dismissed; impacts governance disputes over nonprofit-to-commercial transition.

After around two hours of deliberation, the jury has reached a unanimous verdict in Musk v. Altman, the tech trial of the year. The group found that two claims were barred by the statute of limitations, and a third failed thanks to the dismissal of one of these. The jury here is an advisory jury, meaning the group is installed solely to offer another opinion to the judge, and its verdict is technically not legally binding. Ultimately, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is the ultimate legal authority - and she accepted the decision. The jury found that Musk's claim for breach of charita...

Elon Musk's claim that he was mistreated by his OpenAI cofounders failed after nine California jurors decided in a unanimous verdict that his lawsuits had been filed too late.

A big theme in the trial’s final days was whether OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is trustworthy.

In the final week of the Musk v. Altman trial, lawyers traded blows over Elon Musk’s and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s credibility. Altman was grilled on his alleged history of lying and self-dealing involving companies that do business with OpenAI. But he fired back, painting Musk as a power-seeker who wanted to control the development…

Here's what the biggest tech court case of the year is all about.

More than 50 employees have reportedly left Elon Musk’s newly merged SpaceXAI since February, raising questions about burnout, leadership changes, talent poaching, and whether liquidity events weakened retention incentives.

Yesterday, in Musk v. Altman, before the jurors came in, Sam Altman's team passed up what looked - from a distance - like a little league trophy. It was not. Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers had the lawyers read the inscription aloud for the press: "Never stop being a jackass." It's a commemoration OpenAI employees bought for research scientist Josh Ackiam, who testified yesterday. How exactly did this come up in a trial about nonprofit contract law? Allegedly, when Elon Musk was leaving OpenAI, he talked about wanting to race ahead of Google. Achiam, who worked on AI safety, asked if that was really s...

Xi meeting may force Trump to pivot on semiconductor tariffs and Taiwan.

Anthropic has released new findings on why its Claude bot blackmailed users as part of an experiment conducted by the AI company last year—and Elon Musk is jumping in to take some of the blame. Last week, Anthropic published a report saying it had fixed Claude’s “agentic misalignment,” or AI actions that deviate from intended behaviors, including ones that may harm humanity. A case study Anthropic conducted last year created a fictional company called Summit Bridge, and Claude was given control of the firm’s email system. When the bot found a message about plans to be shut down, it identif...

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says Elon Musk did "huge damage" to the culture of the AI startup. During testimony as part of Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, Altman said Musk required OpenAI president Greg Brockman and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever to rank researchers by their accomplishments and "take a chainsaw through a bunch." Altman conceded that this was the management style the Tesla CEO was known for, but that it was incompatible with his startup. "I don't think Mr. Musk understood how to run a good research lab," Altman testified when his lawyer, William Savitt, asked about the impact ...

Sam Altman testifies that Elon Musk sought total control of OpenAI to pass to his heirs; governance dispute.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has begun his testimony against Elon Musk in a high-profile jury trial in a California federal courtroom. Altman, alongside OpenAI president Greg Brockman, is a primary defendant in the trial brought by Musk. Altman, Brockman, and Musk were all part of the initial founding team at OpenAI, with Musk investing up to $38 million in the ChatGPT-maker's early days. But the relationship between Musk and other OpenAI founders eventually soured, and Musk stepped away from the company, later going on to found his own direct competitor, xAI. In recent years, Musk and Altman have t...

Stratechery opinion: Elon Musk's dual involvement in SpaceX and xAI mirrors Anthropic's structure; argues Musk should focus xAI on B2B services.

In the second week of the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, Musk’s motivations for bringing the suit were under scrutiny. Last week, Musk took the stand, alleging that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had deceived him into donating $38 million to the company. He claimed that they’d promised to maintain…

Three months ago, Elon Musk wrote on X that Anthropic was “evil,” “misanthropic,” and that the AI lab hated Western civilization. On Wednesday, he leased Anthropic one of his most valuable assets: the world’s biggest supercomputer. But Anthropic-lovers shouldn’t bask too long in Musk’s newfound praise (even if he did decide that “nobody set off my evil detector” ). The deal has little to do with them as a company, analysts told Fortune, and everything to do with an upcoming prospectus. SpaceX is expected to begin its public roadshow next month, with a confidential S-1 filed April 1 targeti...

Can Sam Altman—or any CEO—be trusted with super intelligence?

Musk was “prepared to do the for-profit, provided he would get control.”

Reddit user criticizes Anthropic for perceived inconsistency between military use ethics policies and data handling via third-party infrastructure.

Cutthroat negotiations between startup founders are rarely shared so publicly, especially when a company becomes as world-changing as OpenAI.

SpaceX, Elon Musk's space company that also houses his AI company, xAI, is considering spending $55 billion, at least initially, to build a semiconductor factory in Texas, according to a filing with Grimes County.

Elon Musk argued the journals show the moment when OpenAI abandoned its mission.

Reddit post claims Musk's fear of DeepMind CEO Hassabis motivated OpenAI founding; cites trial testimony about 2015 meeting.

Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and Elon Musk's xAI have agreed to allow the US government to review new AI models before they're released to the public. In an announcement on Tuesday, the Commerce Department's Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) says it will work with the AI companies to perform "pre-deployment evaluations and targeted research to better assess frontier AI capabilities." CAISI, which started evaluating models from OpenAI and Anthropic in 2024, says it has performed 40 reviews so far. Both companies "have renegotiated their existing partnerships with the center to bett...

About a week into the Musk v. Altman trial, we've heard from some of the most powerful people in tech - including OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Elon Musk's fixer Jared Birchall, and Musk himself. But one of the most prominent characters is hovering around the margins: Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind. Hassabis is the architect of Google's in-house AI lab. He founded DeepMind as an independent startup in 2010 and sold it to Google four years later, reportedly for between $400-650 million. Since then, he's been at the helm of many of Google's largest AI research breakthroughs, like Alph...

When the bromance sours, we all end up in court. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images The strongest witness for Elon Musk's case against OpenAI so far has been Greg Brockman's journal. Brockman himself is running as a close second. Brockman was called to the stand in a rather unusual way - he was cross-examined first, followed by a direct examination - and he had some serious high school debate club energy. There was a lot of "I wouldn't characterize it that way," "I wouldn't say it that way," and "That sounds like something I wrote. Can I see it in context?" When Musk's attorney,...

OpenAI president Greg Brockman stated the company is exploring an IPO during testimony at Elon Musk litigation.

Stuart Russell is a long-time AI researcher who thinks governments need to restrain frontier labs.

Musk texted OpenAI's president and co-founder saying that he and CEO Sam Altman "will be the most hated men in America."

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Two of the most powerful people in AI—Sam Altman and Elon Musk—began their face-off in court in Oakland, California, last week. Musk is suing OpenAI, alleging that the millions he spent to…