Musk mulled handing OpenAI to his children, Altman testifies

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lastly took the stand this morning to defend himself towards his former co-founder Elon Musk’s lawsuit difficult OpenAI’s company construction.

Altman was instantly requested what he considered Musk’s allegation that OpenAI’s different founders “stole a charity” after they launched a for-profit subsidiary to market merchandise based mostly on the corporate’s AI fashions.

“It feels troublesome to even wrap my head round that framing,” Altman stated after a number of seconds of silence. “We created one of many largest charities on the earth. This basis is doing unbelievable work and can do far more.”

Musk’s attorneys have been at pains to level out that OpenAI’s basis, which now has belongings on the order of $200 billion, didn’t have full-time staff till earlier this 12 months. OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor testified at the moment that was merely due to the problem of changing OpenAI fairness to money, which was completed with the group’s most up-to-date restructuring in 2025.

The central query posed by Musk’s attorneys is whether or not the corporate’s dedication to security had been left behind as its industrial energy grew. However Altman stated that in 2017, throughout a pivotal interval when the founders wrestled with easy methods to acquire the funding to energy their AI fashions, Musk’s “particular plans on security made me fear.”

He described a “notably hair-raising second” within the debate when Musk was requested what would occur if he died whereas controlling a hypothetical OpenAI for-profit. In Altman’s telling, Musk stated, “Possibly OpenAI ought to go to my kids.”

Altman stated that Musk’s deal with controlling the preliminary for-profit gave him pause as a result of OpenAI was devoted to retaining superior AI out of the fingers of a single individual, and Altman, together with his expertise working the distinguished startup accelerator Y Combinator, knew “founders who had management often didn’t give it up.”

Altman additionally testified that Musk’s administration ways, which could have labored for engineering and manufacturing, did not work at OpenAI.

“I do not assume Mr. Musk understood easy methods to run a superb analysis lab,” Altman stated. “He had demotivated a few of our most key researchers. He had at one level required Greg and Ilya to make a listing of the researchers and listing out their accomplishments and stack rank them and take a chainsaw by means of a bunch. That did enormous injury for a very long time to the tradition of the group.”

Certainly, Altman forged himself as defending the “sweat fairness” of fellow co-founders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, the 2 folks successfully working OpenAI on the time whereas Musk and Altman had different jobs.

After that conflict went unresolved, Musk in the end left OpenAI’s board and began competing AI initiatives at Tesla and his personal AI startup, xAI. However Altman stored in contact with the mercurial businessman, updating him on OpenAI’s work and looking for his funding and recommendation.

OpenAI’s attorneys famous that Musk had been stored updated and requested to take part within the investments that his lawsuits now declare corrupted the non-profit.

Throughout one dialogue of a Microsoft funding into OpenAI in 2018, Altman stated that “in contrast to plenty of conferences with Mr. Musk, this was a superb vibes assembly,” the place Musk spent a “lengthy dialog displaying us memes on his cellphone.”