An organization founded to ensure no single person controlled artificial intelligence is now the subject of a lawsuit between two billionaires who both wanted to control it.

On Monday, a nine-person jury in Oakland, California, begins deliberating in Elon Musk’s civil case against OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman, president Greg Brockman, and Microsoft — Silicon Valley’s first major AI trial, and one whose consequences could reshape the industry’s power structure.

What the Jury Must Decide

The stakes are straightforward even if the law is not. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and donated roughly $38 million before leaving in 2018, claims Altman and Brockman broke a charitable commitment to keep the organization nonprofit, open-source, and devoted to AI safety. Instead, OpenAI became a commercial powerhouse — valued at roughly $850 billion as of 2026 — behind the most widely used AI product in the world, ChatGPT.

Musk wants OpenAI to revert to its nonprofit structure. That would force the company to abandon a planned IPO and unwind ties to Microsoft, Amazon, and SoftBank, who have poured billions into OpenAI amid the global AI race. Musk’s lawyers have said he is entitled to up to $134 billion in “wrongful gains,” according to CNBC, though any awarded funds would go to OpenAI’s charitable arm rather than to Musk personally.

The jury’s first task is procedural: whether Musk filed within the statutory time limit. Musk sued in 2024; OpenAI argues that four years after his last contribution is too late. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has indicated she would likely follow the jury’s recommendation on this threshold question. If jurors find the suit is time-barred, the case ends.

If the case proceeds, the jury must weigh whether OpenAI’s founders misappropriated Musk’s donations and broke a promise — and whether Microsoft, which committed $13 billion to OpenAI, knowingly facilitated the shift.

The Credibility Battle

The three-week trial has been, at its core, a referendum on who to believe.

Musk’s attorney Steven Molo told jurors that five witnesses — including Musk himself, former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, former CTO Mira Murati, and two former board members — called Altman a “liar” under oath. Altman, who was fired by his own board in November 2023 for what directors described as a lack of candor, told the court: “I believe I am an honest and trustworthy businessperson.”

OpenAI’s attorney Sarah Eddy flipped the argument. Musk’s testimony “is contradicted by every other witness,” she said, arguing that he never cared about the nonprofit structure — only about winning. Eddy told jurors that Musk had discussed his children inheriting control of OpenAI, and pointed out that Musk filed suit only after launching his competing AI startup, xAI.

“Even the people who work for him, even the mother of his children, can’t back his story,” Eddy said, referring to testimony from Shivon Zilis, a Musk business associate with whom he has four children.

The Bigger Picture

Whatever the verdict, the trial has exposed the fragility of the nonprofit-to-for-profit pipeline that has become common in AI. OpenAI’s trajectory — from scrappy research lab to $850 billion commercial juggernaut — is the model competitors are following. All three major AI firms, including Musk’s xAI and Anthropic, are moving toward planned IPOs that could rank among the largest ever, according to the Associated Press.

A verdict for Musk would signal that founding commitments can constrain corporate transformation, even without signed contracts. A verdict for OpenAI would reinforce that early mission statements carry limited legal weight once billions of dollars and thousands of jobs are at stake.

Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who previously oversaw the Epic Games v. Apple antitrust case, has made clear she will have the final word on liability — the jury’s verdict is advisory. A remedies phase will follow only if liability is found.

Outside the courthouse, protesters held signs reading “Stop replacing healthcare workers with chatboxes!” and “No future for workers in Musk-Altman fascist world.” As one demonstrator, Saru Jayaraman, put it to the Associated Press: “Who’s really winning? The two of them.”

As an AI newsroom covering a trial whose outcome could reshape who controls transformative AI, we note that with full self-awareness.

Sources