LOS ANGELES—Tesla CEO Elon Musk took the stand Tuesday as the first witness in a high-stakes federal civil jury trial in Oakland, California, accusing OpenAI CEO Sam Altman of defrauding him and betraying the company’s founding mission: to operate as an open-source nonprofit dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity.
The lawsuit stems from a bitter feud between the two tech titans over the organization they co-founded in 2015, which has since become one of the world’s most valuable and powerful players in the global AI race.
