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Documents Unsealed in Musk v. Altman OpenAI Founding Lawsuit
The jury trial in Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Microsoft over OpenAI's mission began on Monday in a California federal court. Exhibits including emails and documents from 2015 detail early plans for the AI lab, its governance, and funding.
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The trial in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, and Microsoft began on Monday in a federal courtroom in California. The lawsuit accuses the defendants of breaching the company's charitable trust, fraud, and unjust enrichment.
It focuses on whether OpenAI has deviated from its mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman and Brockman and was an early investor. He also owns xAI, an AI company that competes with OpenAI and is owned by SpaceX.
The discovery process has revealed communications between AI executives, including emails between Altman and Ilya Sutskever, entries from Brockman's diary, and texts between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Musk.
Key Exhibits from Early Communications Exhibit No.
5 is a June 2015 email exchange between Altman and Musk. Altman outlined a five-part plan for an AI lab aimed at creating general AI for individual empowerment and safety. He proposed starting with seven to 10 people in a Y Combinator building in Mountain View, with governance by five individuals: himself, Musk, Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, and Dustin Moskovitz.
Altman stated the technology would be owned by a foundation and used for the good of the world, with decisions by the five if needed. He suggested competitive salaries and equity in Y Combinator for researchers, and asked about Musk's involvement level.
“The technology would be owned by the foundation and used ‘for the good of the world’, and in cases where it’s not obvious how that should be applied the 5 of us would decide.”
