Musk v. Altman proved that AI is led by the wrong people

This year’s technical trial Musk v. AltmanIt was ultimately a struggle for control. Elon Musk said that Sam Altman, with whom he helped found the now massive OpenAI, should not be directing the future of AI. In turn, Altman’s lawyers mocked Musk’s credibility. The jury came back to A Judgment On Monday, after just two hours of deliberation, Musk’s claims were dismissed due to the statute of limitations.

From a purely legal standpoint, three weeks of testimony yielded nothing. But the trial offered a broader and more compelling conclusion: approx No one in this saga seems worthy of trust. Some of the most powerful people in technology seem temperamentally incapable of dealing with each other honestly. If this is true, it raises a bigger question: why do they control A Trillion dollars An industry that is set to upend people’s lives?

OpenAI was founded, according to both Musk and Altman’s testimony, to prevent powerful AI from being owned and developed by the wrong people. Testimonials and evidence showed that its founding team was concerned about who would control artificial general intelligence (AGI), a buzzword for artificial intelligence that equals or exceeds human knowledge and ability on a broad scale. they He is very afraid Google DeepMind and its leader Demis Hassabis. In 2015, Altman said he was thinking about whether anything could “prevent humanity from developing artificial intelligence” — and after concluding it was impossible, he wanted “someone other than Google to do it first.”

Fellow founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever were so opposed to one-person control that they seemed willing to torpedo a lucrative deal that could, in their words, give Musk an “AI dictatorship.” In part of the same email to Altman, Brockman and Sutskever questioned his motives, writing: “We have not been able to fully trust your judgment throughout this process… Is artificial general intelligence really your primary motivation? And how does it relate to your policy goals?”

These will be fears Installs quickly. Central focus for Musk v. Altman It was the “tipping point,” a five-day period in November 2023 when OpenAI’s board fired Altman as CEO. Sutskever has been eliminated More than a year Engineering his ouster, compiling a 52-page memo alleging a “consistent pattern of lying, undermining his executives, and pitting his executives against each other.” The implications were broader than infighting among executives, likely affecting the overall deployment of AI systems. For example, then-CTO Mira Moratti testified in court that Altman told her that her legal team at OpenAI had agreed to skip a safety review of one of its models — a statement, she said, that turned out to be untrue.

In closing arguments, Musk’s lawyer, Stephen Mollo, emphasized the long list of people who have testified under oath that Altman was a liar in one way or another, all of whom Altman has worked with for years. “The defendants are desperate to believe Sam Altman,” Mollo told the jury. “If you can’t trust him, if you can’t believe him, they can’t win. It’s that simple.”

But during the court proceedings, Musk – who now leads his space company SpaceX’s rival xAI lab – fared no better. Joshua Achiam, chief futurist at OpenAI, testified that Musk’s race against Google led him to take a “clearly unsafe and reckless” approach to achieving general artificial intelligence. When he and others raised concerns, he says, Musk argued that OpenAI’s for-profit turn had created incentives to ignore safety, but that its AI is for-profit and, at best, Random approach to safety. In order to ensure that OpenAI remained open, Musk was obsessed with his need to control it. In closing arguments, Sarah Eddy, one of OpenAI’s lawyers, told the jury that Musk “wants to control artificial general intelligence.”

As one X user Put it down“If mistrust had a large mass, putting Musk and Altman too close together would collapse the courtroom and the entire Earth into a black hole.”

OpenAI and Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

And it’s not just Musk and Altman. Proposed trial evidence Moratti helped remove Altman, then switched sides to support his reinstatement while appearing “not at all interested” in revealing what role she played. Shivon Zillis, one of Musk’s close associates who served on OpenAI’s board, asked Musk if he would “prefer that I remain close and friendly with OpenAI to keep the information flowing” while he was gone — avoiding revealing that she had two children with him at the time. Brockman’s memoirs played a key role in Musk’s case; At one point, he admitted that Musk could “validly” claim “we haven’t been honest with him” if OpenAI makes a for-profit shift without his involvement.

Musk v. Altman He gave every man a chance Ropes dirt in the other In theory, it has proven itself to be the most accurate guardian of artificial intelligence. But the most obvious conclusion is that many of the best-known names in the AI ​​industry are at best naive — and at worst, hypocritical and care little about the consequences of their actions.

Public sentiment around artificial intelligence is at an all-time low. In a Pew Research poll last summer, Half of adults in the United States He said that “the increasing use of AI in everyday life makes them feel more anxious than excited” – and only 10% said they felt more excited than anxious. Many of these concerns are related to job losses, but protests are also rising against the construction of mass data centers Defeat the nation. Some resistance turned into potential violence, with individuals present Attempt to attack Altman’s house On two occasions. And many technology CEOs themselves maintains That they have bunkers or other plans to prepare for doomsday if things go wrong.

These companies Push public messages That artificial intelligence empowers its users. But a 2025 Pew Research Center study found so Nearly 60 percent of adults in the United States feel they have little control over how artificial intelligence is used in their lives. In the United States, the prospects for real government regulation – which could provide at least some level of outside oversight – remain fragile. Now, it is clearer than ever how far the biggest players in the AI ​​world will go to maintain control.

Amid a wealth of trial evidence, one document provides a rare example of Altman and Musk offering to cede some power. In March 2015, Altman emailed Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella with a simple request: Sign a letter he and Musk were drafting, asking the US government to create “a new regulatory agency for the safety of artificial intelligence” and address “the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity that most ignore.” Weeks later, Nadella responded by shutting down the idea. “The issue of human safety and the problem of control will become real issues,” he said. But he insisted that executives should advocate for “federal funding and encouragement of research,” not censorship. Altman immediately agreed. He promised to change the message, leaving the option of regulating the AI ​​industry “if and when.”