Ray Seilie was recently quoted in an Axios article titled “In Musk v. Altman trial, the entire AI industry lost.”
The lawsuit, filed by Elon Musk in February 2024, alleged that OpenAI and its executives, including CEO Sam Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman, violated the company’s core agreement of being a charitable mission by prioritizing profits over AI safety. Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit research lab in 2015, with Musk contributing roughly $38 million towards the project. In early 2018, Musk proposed taking full control of OpenAI, either through a majority for-profit stakeholder or folding the organization into Tesla. Altman and Brockman rejected the proposal, leading Musk to leave the OpenAI board in February 2018. In 2019, OpenAI formed a for-profit subsidiary, with Microsoft investing $1 billion.
While the lawsuit and trial, which took place from April 27, 2026 to May 18, 2026, were expected to highlight the shift to power being a motivator, versus building AI for humanity’s benefit, the trial came to an anticlimactic end when jurors unanimously ruled that Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft was barred by the statute of limitations.
“The trial ended with “a predictable whimper” over procedure,” Ray tells Axios. He continued to note that the central question posed by the lawsuit went unanswered: how much freedom nonprofits have to restructure after making commitments to donors and the public.
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