Elon Musk and Sam Altman, Once Close Partners, to Face Off in Court

Trial Set for April 27
"Musk Claims OpenAI Broke Promise
to Develop Open-Source Models and Operate as a Nonprofit"

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla (left), Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. Reuters, Yonhap News Agency

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, and Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, who once worked closely together, are set to face each other in court this April. The two, who co-founded OpenAI, parted ways in 2018 and will be meeting in court for the first time in over eight years.

According to AFP on the 13th (local time), the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California confirmed through an order that the trial will begin on April 27. The trial will be held before a jury, and it is expected that proceedings could last up to four weeks.

The key issue is whether CEO Altman broke his promise to run OpenAI as a nonprofit organization pursuing the public interest and to develop open-source artificial intelligence (AI) models, thereby deceiving CEO Musk.

According to the publicly released complaint, CEO Musk claims that he was guaranteed such promises at the time of the company’s founding and argues that OpenAI’s actions constitute a breach of contract. He also stated that DeepMind, a subsidiary of Google (Alphabet), could create a general-purpose AI (AGI) for commercial gain, which could pose significant risks, and that OpenAI planned to develop AI technology to counter this.

CEO Musk has asked the court to order OpenAI to release its research and technology to the public and to prevent assets, including GPT-4, from being used by Microsoft or individuals for profit. He also requested that GPT-4 and OpenAI’s next-generation AI project ‘Q’ be classified as AGI and excluded from the licensing scope with Microsoft.

OpenAI, which has described such attempts as “broad harassment” and “baseless claims,” argued that Musk’s assertions lack merit and requested the lawsuit be dismissed. However, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is presiding over the case, rejected this request. She stated, “While not direct evidence, circumstantial evidence is sufficient for judgment,” indicating that there is enough evidence for the case to proceed.

In fact, last week, hundreds of pieces of evidence related to the case were released. According to U.S. business media outlet Business Insider (BI), these included text messages from 2023 revealing the tense relationship between the two men before Musk filed the lawsuit.

Musk, who participated as a co-founder of OpenAI, left the board in 2018, three years later. Since then, OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022 and received billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft, emerging as an iconic company in the field of generative AI. In July of the following year, CEO Musk established the rival company xAI and developed and launched the generative AI technology ‘Grok’.