Musk loses the titans' judicial duel against Sam Altman for artificial intelligence

BarcelonaThey were soulmates, but in recent weeks they have fought a battle in court with daggers drawn and the future of the artificial intelligence sector at stake. Elon Musk sued Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI – the company that created ChatGPT – because he believed that the planned stock market launch contravened the foundational principle according to which the entity was to operate on a non-profit basis, prioritizing the benefit of humanity over private economic gain. A California court, however, has dismissed this claim after only two hours of deliberation.

Musk was one of OpenAI's early backers in 2015, although he left the board three years later. The lawsuit, however, was not formalized until 2024, and this delay was crucial for the jury to determine that the claim had been made out of time, by which point the entity had long been operating as a conventional company.

The move by the owner of the X network is interpreted as an operation to prevent ChatGPT from becoming the dominant AI service in the market once the company goes public, with the support of Microsoft and an estimated valuation of one trillion dollars. Musk, after failing to control OpenAI, ended up founding his own artificial intelligence company, xAI, which is currently integrated into his aerospace company SpaceX. This company is also preparing its stock market debut, with a similar valuation.

Altman's lawyers based their defense on recalling that Musk's donations were not conditioned on any specific legal form and argued that restructuring the foundation into a company was the only way to remain competitive in a market where Google's DeepMind also aspires to be hegemonic. Furthermore, they revealed that Musk himself, who was now suing over this commercialization, had pushed to turn OpenAI into a company, as long as he retained control, to the point of proposing to integrate it into Tesla, his car company.