Sam Altman sat in a federal courtroom in Oakland and told a judge he is an “honest and trustworthy business person.”
Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO is seeking $130 billion in damages. The core allegation: OpenAI abandoned its founding nonprofit mission and became exactly the kind of profit-driven AI juggernaut it was created to prevent.
What Altman said on the stand
Altman’s testimony centered on a theme that should be familiar to anyone who has watched power struggles unfold at tech companies. He argued that OpenAI’s foundational principles were specifically designed so that no single person could exert control over the organization.
Musk co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit research lab in 2015. Musk departed from the organization in 2018, and in the years since, OpenAI has transformed into something that looks a lot more like a conventional tech giant than a charitable research institute.
