Musk, Altman to Face Off in Court Over the Future of OpenAI

A bitter feud between the tech billionaires stems from allegations that Altman betrayed the company’s nonprofit mission.

A computer with the OpenAI logo is staged on a gradient blue background with the shadow of a man in the background in Grenoble, France, on Feb. 12, 2025. Anouk Anglade/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

LOS ANGELES—A contentious battle years in the making between Tesla owner Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will next week land before a federal court in Oakland, California, where nine jurors will be asked to decide whether Altman and others betrayed OpenAI’s founding mission as a nonprofit artificial intelligence (AI) lab dedicated to the public good.

The outcome could have a profound impact, not just for OpenAI—the creator of ChatGPT, currently valued at $852 billion and poised for a public offering—but for the broader, dizzyingly high-stakes race to advance AI technology and dominate the commercial market.

Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and served as an early investor, filed suit against co-founders Altman and Greg Brockman, alleging that they bilked him out of tens of millions of dollars with the false promise that the project would remain an open-source nonprofit—and act as a safety hatch on the “grave threat” posed by profit-driven advancement of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

AGI is generally understood as the hypothetical point at which AI reaches or surpasses human cognitive abilities and can operate autonomously, which many experts warn poses an existential threat to humanity.

Musk claims that Altman and Brockman secretly planned to convert to a for-profit corporation with backing from Microsoft, a major investor to which OpenAI exclusively licensed its flagship product.

“Mr. Altman caused OpenAI to radically depart from its original mission and historical practice of making its technology and knowledge available to the public,” Musk alleged in the lawsuit.

“Altman set the bait and hooked Musk with sham altruism then flipped the script as the non-profit’s technology approached AGI and profits neared.”

OpenAI counters that Musk agreed that a for-profit structure would be necessary to raise sufficient capital but walked away when other founders disagreed that he should be the one to lead it.

“Motivated by jealousy, regret for walking away from OpenAI and a desire to derail a competing AI company, Elon has spent years harassing OpenAI through baseless lawsuits and public attacks,” the company wrote on the OpenAI website in a running commentary on the feud.

A Troubled History

In 2023, OpenAI’s board fired Altman, stating that it had lost confidence in him after he was “not consistently candid.” Musk alleges that his reinstatement days later, after a majority of board members resigned, was orchestrated by Microsoft.

In its response to the suit’s claims that it engaged in anticompetitive behavior with OpenAI, Microsoft argued that Musk’s “evidence-free” antitrust claims “make no sense.”

The same year, Musk founded xAI and launched Grok to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In February 2025, he led a hostile, unsuccessful bid to acquire OpenAI’s assets for $97.4 billion—which, according to OpenAI’s counterclaims, was a “sham bid” meant to disrupt the company’s fundraising and planned reorganization.

The trial follows years of increasingly heated sparring on X and in the press over the former partners’ acrimonious split and ensuing competition.

It also comes at a time when Altman’s leadership has come under scrutiny following the dissolution of two OpenAI safety teams, as well as claims that he deceived executives and board members about safety protocols and exhibited a “consistent pattern of lying,” detailed in internal communications by Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist, in 2023 and more recently in a New Yorker article.

“Over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products,” Jan Leike, a former safety leader at the company, wrote in a 2024 post on X announcing his departure.

OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary in 2019; as part of a 2025 restructuring, it moved its intellectual property and employees to the for-profit venture. The OpenAI Foundation, its nonprofit arm, retains a 26 percent stake and “continues to control” the corporation, according to OpenAI.

Microsoft maintains a 27 percent stake in the corporation.

Musk is asking that OpenAI be reverted to a nonprofit, that more than $100 billion in damages be returned to it, and that Altman and Brockman be removed from their leadership roles.

Internal Documents

At the time of OpenAI’s founding in 2015, according to Musk’s lawsuit, Altman expressed grave concerns that superhuman machine intelligence posed the “greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.”

The two agreed to build a lab that could compete with Google, then the most powerful contender in the field, but that would be entirely open-source and philanthropic, functioning as a safeguard against profit-driven AGI.

In 2017, Brockman, Altman, and Sutskever considered a shift to for-profit status necessary to achieve AGI; Musk suggested keeping the project nonprofit but attaching it to Tesla as its “cash cow.”

Internal communications from that time, revealed in court documents, offer insight into arguments both sides intend to make about the contested timeline surrounding a decision to restructure as a for-profit corporation.

OpenAI alleges that Musk’s inability to recall critical discussions about the future of the company in 2017 may be due to the use of recreational drugs at Burning Man and that his relationship with former board member Shivon Zilis functioned as a secret liaison to the company, including while the board approved Microsoft investments that Musk now claims violate OpenAI’s charitable trust.

Musk alleges that Brockman’s private digital journals show that Brockman and Altman conspired to deceive him about the direction of the company, even as they continued to accept his funding.

Responding to an ultimatum from Musk, Altman said he remained “enthusiastic” about the nonprofit structure.

Subsequently, Brockman wrote in his journal that the turn to for-profit status would likely include “a very nasty fight,” that Sutskever considered it immoral to kick Musk out, and that Musk’s story “will correctly be“ that Brockman and Altman ”weren’t honest with him in the end about still wanting to do the for profit just without him,” according to court documents.

In another entry included in court documents, Brockman said: “It’d be wrong to steal the non-profit from him. To convert to a b-corp without him. That’d be pretty morally bankrupt. And he’s really not an idiot.”

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rodgers of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California cited Brockman’s notes—which she said could be read as intended to deceive—in her Jan. 15 ruling denying OpenAI’s motion for summary judgment.

In a Jan. 16 post on X, Brockman suggested that Musk “cherry-picked” from his personal journal.

“Elon and we had agreed [that] a for-profit was the next step for OpenAI’s mission,“ Brockman said. ”The context shows these snippets were actually about whether to accept Elon’s draconian terms.”

Artificial General Intelligence

In 2023, Musk joined more than 1,000 researchers and tech leaders in an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of systems more powerful than ChatGPT-4. Altman largely dismissed the letter as “missing most technical nuance” and “not the optimal way” to address safety issues.

Part of Musk’s claims center around the idea that Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT-4) has already achieved an early version of AGI.

“It is better at reasoning than average humans,” he noted in the lawsuit.

Microsoft researchers in a 2023 paper reported that GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks across a range of disciplines with performance “strikingly close to human level” and could “reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an ... AGI system.”

OpenAI defines AGI as the point at which AI will “outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”

In an April 22 podcast, Altman and Brockman said they viewed the trial as an opportunity to tell their side of the story.

“I think it’s insane that he’s doing this,” Altman said of Musk. “But I am happy that we get to explain all this to the world and have this chapter behind us.”

Addressing questions of safety and human flourishing, Altman said OpenAI is increasingly focused on “iterative deployment,” which he described as “figuring out how to deploy products that get increasingly safe as the stakes go up.”

As the threshold of AGI approaches, the promise made by Altman—that the technology will create unprecedented wealth, cure disease, and benefit all of humanity—appears distant, especially for tech workers.

Meta last week announced that it was laying off about 8,000 employees, or about 10 percent of its global workforce, and closing another 6,000 positions, as it invests heavily in AI. In order to train AI systems, the company plans to deploy software to track employee mouse movements and keyboard clicks, according to reporting from Reuters.

Other major tech companies, including Microsoft and Amazon, have recently announced layoffs in the wake of increased AI investment.

So far this year, more than 92,000 tech workers have been laid off, according to the tracker site Layoffs.fyi.

Jury selection in the Oakland trial begins on April 27.