OpenAI chief Sam Altman makes a high-stakes appearance in his court bout with Elon Musk

More than two weeks into the trial in a federal courthouse in Oakland, California, neither of the tech titans has emerged as an overly sympathetic character. But nobody has more to lose than Altman.

Even if Musk loses the case, the trial has invited further scrutiny of Altman’s leadership at a crucial time for the company and its competition with Musk’s own AI firm and another rival, Anthropic, formed by a group of seven ex-OpenAI leaders. All three firms are moving toward planned initial public offerings that are expected to be some of the largest ever.

Altman testified he had concerns about Musk’s attempts to gain more control over OpenAI, which was aiming to safely build a better-than-human form of AI called artificial general intelligence.

“Part of the reason we started OpenAI is we didn’t think AGI could be under the control of any one person,” Altman said, describing what he called a “particularly hair-raising moment when my co-founders asked Mr. Musk about, well, ‘If you have control, what happens when you die?’”

Altman said Musk’s response was that maybe the control should “pass to my children.” Altman said he did not feel comfortable with that.

A jury that’s already heard about Altman’s character from a parade of his former allies and adversaries will ultimately decide the verdict. But the repercussions could reverberate widely.

“This is not looking good for any of them, and I think that that’s a little bit unfortunate for the AI industry at a time when the public perception of AI is quite negative and seems to be getting worse,” said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute.

Musk warned Altman would be one of America's ‘most hated’ men

The lawsuit accuses Altman and his top lieutenant, Greg Brockman, of double-crossing Musk by straying from the San Francisco company’s founding mission to be an altruistic steward of a revolutionary technology. The lawsuit alleges they shifted into a moneymaking mode behind his back.

Shortly before the trial began, Musk abandoned a bid for damages for himself and instead is seeking an unspecified amount of money to be paid to fund the altruistic efforts of OpenAI’s charitable arm. In a text exchange with Brockman proposing a possible settlement, Musk warned that Brockman and Altman “will be the most hated men in America” as a result of the trial.

While Musk, the head of SpaceX, Tesla and a slew of other companies, was well known by the San Francisco Bay Area jury pool, fewer knew who Altman was before the start of the trial, even if they were familiar with ChatGPT.

Since the start of the trial, testimony about Altman’s turbulent tenure at OpenAI has become prime fodder for internet jokes. One piece of evidence that has inspired countless memes was a text exchange between Altman and a company officer, Mira Murati, in 2023 during his short-lived ouster as CEO, when Altman asked if things were moving “directionally good or bad” and she wrote back: “Sam this is very bad.”

Jurors have heard from witnesses including OpenAI ex-board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, who spoke about the decision to fire Altman in 2023 before they were themselves ousted from the board of directors when Altman returned to his role.

In video testimony last week, Toner said a starting point for the decision to oust Altman was when OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, a respected AI scientist, reached out to confide some of his own concerns.

“A phrase we used was ‘a pattern of behavior,’ so no one single cause,” Toner said. “The pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor, his resistance of board oversight.”

Sutskever was instrumental in the unsuccessful attempt to oust Altman but later said he regretted his role in the shakeup. In his own testimony Monday, Sutskever confirmed that he wrote a 2023 memo to OpenAI’s board that characterized Altman as pitting his executives against one another and exhibiting a “consistent pattern of lying” that was causing a loss of trust and productivity.

He said he later backtracked and signed a letter supporting Altman’s reinstatement to try to keep the company from being destroyed.

OpenAI begins presenting its side

The trial has carried risks also for Musk, who is pursuing an initial public offering this summer for his rocket ship maker, SpaceX, which could make him the world's first trillionaire.

Sutskever testified to his early admiration for Musk as an entrepreneur but said that once they were working together as co-founders, Musk's push for a controlling stake in the startup “just felt aggressive to me.”

Not until midday Monday, on the third week of the trial, did OpenAI begin calling its own witnesses, starting with Bret Taylor, the current chair of OpenAI’s board who painted a more positive portrait of Altman’s leadership.

“I think Sam has done a great job as CEO,” Taylor said. “He’s been forthright with me and the other board members.”

Syracuse University professor Shubha Ghosh, an expert in business and technology law, said regardless of the outcome of the case, he has doubts about Altman staying as OpenAI CEO.

“A lot this of might depend upon a testimony,” he said. “And I don’t know what he’s going to say or how he’s gonna say it. But even like the best case, movie theater type performance, with all the music playing and the angels descending or whatnot, I don’t see him coming off as a fairly strong leader, especially (since) this case has gone this far."

O'Brien contributed from Providence, Rhode Island.