President Donald Trump listens as Elon Musk speaks to reporters at the White House in Washington, Tuesday Sept. 29, 2026, after meeting with top executives of AI firms.
| Photo Credit: AP

A U.S. federal jury ruled Monday that billionaire Elon Musk waited too long to sue OpenAI and its co-founders, delivering a decisive victory to the ChatGPT startup and ending one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched courtroom battles.

The swift decision caps a three-week trial that saw a parade of tech titans take the stand, with Musk arguing that OpenAI’s pivot to a profit-driven business betrayed its original nonprofit mandate.

The jury in Oakland federal court found that Musk’s claims against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, President Greg Brockman, The OpenAI Foundation and Microsoft were barred by statutes of limitations, leaving the core arguments of the world’s richest person largely unaddressed.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who had asked the jury to advise her on the matter, accepted and confirmed their decision.

The outcome spared OpenAI from a potentially existential legal threat.

Had Musk prevailed, he potentially could have forced the company to revert to its nonprofit structure; a move that would have derailed its planned IPO and unwound ties to major investors including Microsoft, Amazon and SoftBank.

“The finding of the jury confirms that this lawsuit was a hypocritical attempt to sabotage a competitor,” OpenAI attorney William Savitt said outside the courthouse.

“Musk can bring his claims, and he can tell his stories, but what the nine members of this jury found is that his stories were just that – stories, not facts,” he added.

Musk, the chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla, had sued OpenAI over its transformation from a scrappy nonprofit into the $850 billion juggernaut behind ChatGPT.

He claimed Altman and Brockman improperly used a $38 million donation intended to sustain OpenAI as a research lab devoted to developing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity.

But in their deliberations, the jury first had to resolve a threshold issue of whether Musk, who filed suit in 2024, four years after his last contribution, had done so within the statutory time limit.

Musk on X said he would appeal, as the “jury never actually ruled on the merits of the case” and that to “loot charities is incredibly destructive to charitable giving in America.”

The tycoon also lashed out at Judge Gonzalez Rogers for setting a “terrible precedent,” writing in a since-deleted post accusations that she was an “activist judge” who used the jury as a “fig leaf” for a flawed ruling she could have made herself.

The outcome had largely been expected to come down to which of the bickering billionaires the jury would believe.

Testimony centred heavily on Altman’s integrity and behind-the-scenes maneuvering that rankled colleagues, many of whom have since left OpenAI.

Attorneys for OpenAI countered with attacks on Musk, pointing to his varying narratives about the early days of the company and parsing testimony from Shivon Zilis, a business associate with whom he has four children, who served as an intermediary between the executives.

Altman, fired by OpenAI’s board in November 2023 for a lack of candour before being reinstated under employee pressure, emerged with allegations of manipulation and a toxic work culture unresolved.

Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest backer with $13 billion committed, was also spared.

“This is an important victory for Altman and OpenAI and clears the path for an IPO by removing this black cloud,” Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities told AFP.

“Musk was creating noise around this lawsuit but ultimately it was more of a soap opera than a long-term negative for OpenAI,” he added.

Published – May 19, 2026 08:12 am IST

Las Vegas, US:

Generative AI, including ChatGPT, was used to organise the New Year’s Day attack outside the Trump International Hotel in the United States’ Las Vegas, where a highly decorated soldier exploded a Tesla Cybertruck. During the investigation, Las Vegas police found that 37-year-old Matthew Livelsberger, who fatally shot himself just before the truck blew up, used the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot to gather information about the legality of fireworks in Arizona and explosive targets.

Highlighting the possible abuse of easily accessible AI capabilities, Kevin McMahill, sheriff of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said that their probe found that Livelsberger didn’t intend to kill anyone, according to a report by Associate Press.

Livelsberger, a member of the elite US special forces, shot himself on New Year’s Day in the rented Tesla vehicle filled with fuel containers and fireworks, which exploded. The blast left seven people with minor injuries.

A week after the attack, police said that an analysis of the soldier’s ChatGPT searches showed that he used it to gather information about explosive targets, the velocity of specific rounds of ammunition, and whether or not fireworks were permitted in Arizona.

Calling the use of generative AI a “game-changer”, McMahill noted that it was possibly the first incident on US soil when ChatGPT was used by someone to build a “particular device.”

“This is the first incident that I’m aware of on U.S. soil where ChatGPT is utilized to help an individual build a particular device…It’s a concerning moment,” he said, adding that police were sharing information with other law enforcement agencies.

In an emailed statement to AP, OpenAI said it was committed to seeing its tools used “responsibly” and that they’re designed to refuse harmful instructions.

“In this case, ChatGPT responded with information already publicly available on the internet and provided warnings against harmful or illegal activities. We’re working with law enforcement to support their investigation,” the statement said.

Launched in 2022, ChatGPT is part of a broader set of technologies developed by the San Francisco-based startup OpenAI. Unlike previous iterations of so-called “large language models,” the ChatGPT tool is available for free to anyone with an internet connection and is designed to be more user-friendly.
 

San Francisco, US:

Suchir Balaji, the 26-year-old OpenAI researcher-turned-whistleblower, was found dead in an apartment in San Francisco, US last month. His death on November 26 was determined suicide by the San Francisco medical examiner’s office as police found no evidence of wrong doing.

Balaji, who left OpenAI in August, has spoken out against the artificial intelligence company’s practice of training the chatbot on copyrighted material scraped from the internet very openly in recent months. The artificial intelligence (AI) giant has been fighting several lawsuits relating to its data-gathering practices.

About Suchir Balaji

Indian American Suchir Balaji grew up in Cupertino, California. A remarkably sharp kid, he excelled in programming contests, placing 31st in the ACM ICPC 2018 World Finals and winning first place in the 2017 Pacific Northwest Regional and Berkeley Programming Contests.

Balaji also secured 7th place in Kaggle’s TSA-sponsored “Passenger Screening Algorithm Challenge,” earning a $100,000 prize. Per his LinkedIn profile, he was the US Open 2016 National Champion and a USACO Finalist.

Like most others in his field, Balaji had been captivated by the promise of artificial intelligence since an early age. In an interview given to the New York Times in October, he mentioned his interest in AI started after he stumbled across a news story about the technology in his teens and imagined that neural networks could solve humanity’s greatest problems.

“I thought that AI was a thing that could be used to solve unsolvable problems, like curing diseases and stopping ageing…I thought we could invent some kind of scientist that could help solve them,” he said, according to the NYT report.

Even before graduating, he worked at Scale AI, Helia, and was a Software Engineer at Quora. In 2020, Balaji joined a stream of Berkeley grads who went to work for OpenAI.

Suchir Balaji’s Time At OpenAI

He worked at OpenAI for four years, during which for one and half years, he helped gather and organize the enormous amounts of internet data the company used to build its online chatbot, ChatGPT.

Balaji told NYT that during his initial data at OpenAI, he did not carefully consider whether the company had a legal right to build its products using both copyrighted and open internet data. It was only after the release of ChatGPT in late 2022 that he started to contemplate the issue and realised that technologies like ChatGPT were damaging the internet by using copyrighted data, violating the law in the process.

By 2024, Balaji said realised “he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit.” He left the company in August this year without any new job and started working on what he called “personal projects.”

He died a day after he was named in a court filing as someone whose files OpenAI would search as part of a lawsuit brought by those who sued the AI giant.

Suchir Balaji’s Allegation Against OpenAI

After leaving OpenAI, Suchir Balaji spoke out publicly against the way AI companies are using copyrighted data to create their technologies. He alleged that the AI models were too dependent on the labour of others as they are trained on copyrighted material scraped from the internet without authorisation.

“This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole,” he told the NYT.

He also explained his concerns on his personal website, where he noted that while generative models rarely produce outputs identical to their training data, the act of replicating copyrighted material during training could violate laws if not protected under “fair use.”

“Because fair use is determined on a case-by-case basis, no broad statement can be made about when generative AI qualifies for fair use,” he noted.

Balaji argued in several cases the chatbots directly compete with the copyrighted works they learned from. “Generative models are designed to imitate online data, so they can substitute for “basically anything” on the internet, from news stories to online forums,” he said.

According to him, the biggest problem is that with AI technologies gradually replacing existing internet services, they sometimes produce “false and sometimes completely made-up information – what researchers call “hallucinations.””

The internet, he said, is changing for the worse.

Allegations Against AI Companies

Balaji was not alone in his concerns about AI companies misusing copyrighter data to train their chatbots. Several US and Canadian news publishers, including the New York Times, have filed lawsuits against OpenAI and its primary partner, Microsoft, claiming they used millions of their articles to build chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.

Many best-selling writers, including John Grisham, also have filed lawsuits against the company.

OpenAI Disputes Claims

OpenAI has disputed Balaji’s claims, insisting that their data use adhered to fair use principles and legal precedents.

“We build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner protected by fair use and related principles, and supported by longstanding and widely accepted legal precedents. We view this principle as fair to creators, necessary for innovators, and critical for US competitiveness,” OpenAI said in a statement.

The company told BBC in November that its software is “grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles that are fair for creators and support innovation”.

Reacting to BAlaji’s death, a spokesperson for OpenAI said, “We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news today and our hearts go out to Suchir’s loved ones during this difficult time.”