\n<\/p>\n
On Monday morning, a jury in Oakland, California, handed a resounding victory to Sam Altman and OpenAI in their long, bitter courtroom battle with Elon Musk.<\/p>\n
The federal jury found Altman, OpenAI and its president, Greg Brockman, not liable for Elon Musk\u2019s claims that they unjustly enriched themselves and broke a founding contract made with Musk when founding the startup. The unanimous verdict, delivered after less than two hours of deliberation, is a stark rebuke of Musk and his lawyer\u2019s claims that Altman \u201cstole a charity\u201d through his leadership of OpenAI.<\/p>\n
The jury\u2019s decision, affirmed immediately by the judge\u2019s dismissal of all charges, provides the AI firm with a stamp of approval for its for-profit plans, already in motion, and a clear path ahead to go public later this year at around a $1tn valuation. Musk\u2019s demands that Altman be removed as CEO and that the for-profit arm of the company transfer some $150bn to the non-profit arm would have jeopardized the blockbuster initial public offering.<\/p>\n
A delay to OpenAI\u2019s financial bonanza may have been one of Musk\u2019s goals. SpaceX \u2013 the centibillionaire\u2019s mega-business that combines a titular rocket launching business, the satellite internet service Starlink and OpenAI competitor xAI \u2013 is reportedly planning to go public in June.<\/p>\n
OpenAI\u2019s plans now seem all but guaranteed, given that the world\u2019s richest man couldn\u2019t put a stop to them. Wall Street, ever wary of upheaval and uncertainty, is likely breathing a sigh of relief, said professor Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University. She called the ruling a reflection of the tough reality that developing frontier AI is expensive and that maintaining non-profit status is not viable in the face of fierce, capital-intensive competition.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe decision is likely to reassure investors and the broader AI sector because it avoids a potentially chaotic outcome that could have challenged OpenAI\u2019s commercial structure, Microsoft partnership, and future fundraising plans,\u201d she said. \u201cPurely nonprofit models are difficult to sustain at the cutting edge.\u201d<\/p>\n
What the trial did not deliver, though, were answers to major questions of the AI boom about safety, governance and labor. Musk had little claim to the mantle of champion of AI safety, given his own company\u2019s many egregious lapses in reining in its chatbot\u2019s offenses.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet\u2019s not confuse the jury\u2019s verdict with justice or accountability for the people of California,\u201d said Catherine Bracy, CEO of the organization Tech Equity. She said Musk lost \u201con a technicality\u201d, referencing the lawsuit\u2019s statute of limitations and called for the state\u2019s attorney general to revisit his agreement with OpenAI that allowed for its conversion to a for-profit enterprise. The jury found that Musk\u2019s suit, which was filed in 2024, did not fall within the statute of limitations to bring his case. One of the key legal arguments in the trial surrounded whether the harms that Musk alleged took place \u2013 including his breach of charitable trust claim \u2013 occurred before certain dates. OpenAI argued that Musk was well aware of the company\u2019s plans to pursue a for-profit structure as early as 2017 and therefore his case was filed outside the three-year limit.<\/p>\n
Kreps echoed Bracy\u2019s point: \u201cThat the trial turned on a procedural issue about timing leaves a lot of questions and debates unresolved, like how these systems should be governed, and who benefits from them economically, and whether the pace of deployment is becoming disconnected from broader public comfort with the technology.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/span>Musk v Altman: tech bros at war over OpenAI \u2013 The Latest<\/span><\/p>\n Musk\u2019s lawyers said he would appeal the case. Despite their loss, they claimed they had achieved their goal of exposing Sam Altman\u2019s deceptions. Attorney Steve Molo claimed that the testimony was \u201cvaluable for the world to see\u201d and that the jury\u2019s decision was a \u201ctechnical\u201d one.<\/p>\n OpenAI\u2019s statement was a more straightforward proclamation of victory: \u201cMr Musk can tell his stories,\u201d said attorney William Savitt. \u201cWhat the jury found today is just that: stories, not facts.\u201d He added that the jury\u2019s verdict was \u201cnot a technical decision; it\u2019s a substantive one\u201d.<\/p>\n Whoever the victor, the trial demonstrated that a small cabal, mostly men, rules the AI industry. As I wrote in April, this trial\u2019s central element was not a fight over AI\u2019s benefit to humanity as it was the hateful vendetta that Musk brought against Altman.<\/p>\n \u201cThe trial also served as a reminder of how much the future of AI still depends on a remarkably small group of powerful tech figures and their personal rivalries,\u201d said Kreps. \u201cIt highlighted a broader disconnect between the people building these systems and many of the people increasingly expected to live and work alongside them.\u201d<\/p>\n Nick Robins-Early contributed reporting<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Monday morning, a jury in Oakland, California, handed a resounding victory to Sam Altman and OpenAI in their long, bitter courtroom battle with Elon Musk. The federal jury found Altman, OpenAI and its president, Greg Brockman, not liable for Elon Musk\u2019s claims that they unjustly enriched themselves and broke a founding contract made with<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49584,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[24561,13768,1313,91,1371,5027,5794,722,11844,3518],"class_list":{"0":"post-49583","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-altmans","9":"tag-ambitions","10":"tag-clears","11":"tag-elon","12":"tag-musk","13":"tag-openais","14":"tag-sam","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-trilliondollar","17":"tag-victory"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=49583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/49584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=49583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=49583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=49583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}