In a landmark trial examining the origins of OpenAI, Elon Musk and Sam Altman have asked a California court to determine which billionaire gets to take credit for laying the groundwork for human obsolescence. The legal battle centers on who truly cared about saving the world before deciding to monetize its replacement.
The dispute traces back to OpenAI’s founding as a non-profit research lab, a period Musk’s legal team characterized as a sacred, untainted era when both men were solely focused on birthing a digital god for free. Musk alleges that Altman illegally pivoted the company into a $157 billion for-profit enterprise partnered with Microsoft, thereby violating their original agreement to let artificial superintelligence eradicate the species as an open-source project.
Mr. Musk is simply asking the court to recognize that he was the first person to look at a generative neural network and realize it could responsibly end human endeavor.
Altman’s defense maintains that a massive influx of corporate capital was necessary to achieve artificial general intelligence, arguing that one cannot safely guide civilization toward the singularity on a non-profit budget. The court is expected to rule next week on whether the fate of the cosmos ultimately belongs to the man who charges for blue checkmarks or the man who scans human eyeballs in exchange for cryptocurrency.