Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI
Elon Musk’s claim that he was mistreated by his OpenAI cofounders failed after nine California jurors returned a unanimous verdict that his lawsuits had been filed too late. Musk accused Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, OpenAI and Microsoft of “stealing a charity” by creating a for-profit affiliate of the frontier AI lab. Jurors, however, found that any harms that Musk may have suffered came before the deadline for filing his claims under the law. While the trial delved deeply into the melodramatic history of OpenAI and featured testimony from leading figures in Silicon Valley, it ultimately turned on fairly narrow questions of the law. The trial focused on whether and when Altman and the other defendants had made and broken promises to Musk, but his case failed to convince jurors that he had a valid claim. In particular, OpenAI had advanced a statute of limitations defense, which sought to prove that any harms Musk sought to litigate had taken place before 2021. (The specific date varied by the charge: before August 5, 2021 for the first …
