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.
