Musk Testifies in OpenAI Lawsuit, Claims He Was Deceived and Admits xAI Uses OpenAI Models

Elon Musk spent three days on the witness stand this week in his lawsuit against OpenAI, according to reports from MIT Technology Review and TechCrunch. The trial, held at a federal courthouse in Oakland, California, saw Musk argue that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had deceived him into funding the company.

According to MIT Technology Review, Musk testified: “I was a fool who provided them free funding to create a startup.” He claimed he gave OpenAI “$38 million of essentially free funding, which they then used to create what would become an $800 billion company.” Musk stated he believed he was donating to a nonprofit developing AI for humanity’s benefit when he cofounded OpenAI in 2015 with Altman and Brockman, not to make the executives rich.

In a notable revelation, Musk confessed “to some audible gasps in the courtroom” that his own AI company xAI, which makes the chatbot Grok, “uses OpenAI’s models to train its own,” according to MIT Technology Review.

According to TechCrunch, Musk’s core argument is that “by converting the company to a for-profit model, Sam Altman betrayed the ‘nonprofit for the benefit of humanity’ mission Musk signed up to fund.” Musk is asking the court to remove Altman and Brockman from their roles and unwind OpenAI’s restructuring that allowed it to operate a for-profit subsidiary, MIT Technology Review reported.

The trial’s outcome could impact OpenAI’s planned IPO at a valuation approaching $1 trillion, according to MIT Technology Review.