In 2015, a small group of researchers and technology entrepreneurs gathered in San Francisco to create what they described as a gift to humanity, eventually to turn into enemies defining the future of artificial intelligence (AI) in a courtroom.

Elon Musk loses blockbuster OpenAI suit as jury says too late

OpenAI was founded on the premise that if artificial general intelligence (AGI) was coming regardless, it was better to have safety and ethics-conscious researchers build it. AGI is the kind of AI that can match or surpass human cognition. The group decided to create the initiative as a nonprofit and if the technology ever arrived, it would belong to everyone, as open source. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman even went as far as to design the company’s board such that it could fire him too if he ever came in the way of its core mission. That founding promise, to build ethical AGI, years later brought Elon Musk and Mr. Altman to a federal courthouse in California.

Eleven years since the founding, no longer friends and both pursuing their own paths to AGI, Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman are both convinced that the other has betrayed everything they had vowed to build together.

Mr. Musk brought forward the lawsuit against Mr. Altman, accusing him, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, and Microsoft, of manipulating him into donating to a public-interest organisation only for it to later attach a for-profit subsidiary and accept billions from Microsoft.

On May 18, a nine-person jury took less than two hours to throw out Mr. Musk’s case against Mr. Altman. The verdict did not settle the question of whether OpenAI broke faith with its founding mission but instead, it was settled on a procedural issue – that Mr. Musk had waited too long to sue. In the American legal system, civil claims must be filed within a fixed window of time, crossing which the claim becomes invalid. The jury said Mr. Musk’s claim fell outside the statute of limitations. The judge concurred, but Mr. Musk’s lawyers have signalled that they might appeal. The merits of the case were never discussed.

The nonprofit debate

Trial testimony and evidence showed OpenAI’s leadership had anxiously tracked Google’s acquisition of another AI research giant DeepMind in 2014.

OpenAI’s executives argued that the nonprofit structure was not sufficient to compete with bigshots like Google.

Mr. Musk was the company’s biggest early donor, contributing around $38 million. But, the economics of building AGI turned out to be brutal. Training large models requires computing infrastructure that costs billions of dollars. By 2019, a year after Mr. Musk’s departure from the OpenAI board, the company decided it could not remain competitive as a pure nonprofit. It attached a for-profit subsidiary to the existing organisation, with the nonprofit retaining oversight and a capped return structure for investors.

Microsoft came in with an initial investment that year, and kept coming, eventually investing more than $135 billion and holding a significant share in OpenAI. This is the transformation Mr. Musk’s lawsuit sought to attack, from nonprofit to a commercially driven AI laboratory he had set out to oppose.

Claims that did not make it to trial

The bit that went to trial eventually was a much smaller subsect of the original claims Mr. Musk had filed in 2024. Several of his claims were dropped or narrowed before the trial even began.

Mr. Musk claimed that Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI had aided it to breach its charitable mission. But, despite a Microsoft executive testifying that the company had invested billions in OpenAI, the jury dismissed the claim.

Mr. Musk also filed an antitrust claim against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the two companies were colluding to dominate the AI market. This claim has not reached the jury yet. Judge Gonzalez Rogers heard arguments and signalled she was sceptical, noting the aggressive competition already playing out across the AI industry. She has not ruled on it, meaning that particular thread remains unresolved. OpenAI on its part filed a countersuit accusing Mr. Musk of running a years-long harassment campaign against the company. A judge ruled in August 2025 that those claims were legally sufficient to go forward. That case is separate and still ongoing.

Key takeaways from the proceedings

The legal question the jury resolved was procedural. But the three weeks of testimony preceding the verdict were pure Silicon Valley tech theatre.

Mr. Musk’s lawyers assembled a long roster of witnesses who testified that Mr. Altman is not trustworthy. Mira Murati, who served as OpenAI’s chief technology officer, told the court that Mr. Altman had lied about a safety review in the past. Ilya Sutskever, one of the company’s founding researchers, had spent more than a year building a case for Mr. Altman’s removal from the company, assembling a 52-page memo that described a pattern of dishonesty and internal manipulation – a case widely covered in media.

In November 2023, OpenAI’s board briefly fired Mr. Altman and reversed course within days, primarily under pressure from Microsoft. Mr. Altman returned and Mr. Sutskever eventually left the company.

OpenAI’s lawyers demonstrated that while still on the board in 2017, Mr. Musk himself had pushed to restructure OpenAI as a for-profit entity, including an attempt to fold it into Tesla under his control.

Mr. Musk’s argument that he had always opposed commercialisation now sat awkwardly alongside evidence that he had sought to commercialise the company himself, especially on the condition that he be in charge. Musk’s own xAI, founded in 2023 and now part of SpaceX, is a for-profit company.

The larger question

The immediate winner from the latest verdict is OpenAI. The lawsuit had cast a shadow over the company’s plans for its upcoming IPO that could value it at close to a trillion dollars. Mr. Musk has said he will appeal.

There is a larger question the verdict leaves entirely unanswered. The trial showed how OpenAI’s founding principles were abandoned in pursuit of competition. The nonprofit structure still exists, and the OpenAI nonprofit now controls assets of more than $200 billion. But what that oversight means in practice was not explored in court.

Published – May 20, 2026 07:30 am IST

The public showdown between Elon Musk and OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman over Musk’s $97.4 billion bid for the artificial intelligence startup is heating up in court.

In a filing Wednesday, Altman said Musk’s all-cash offer undermines the very claim at the heart of his lawsuit against OpenAI – that its assets can’t be “transferred away” for “private gain.” The world’s richest person has sued Altman to thwart OpenAI’s plan to convert to a for-profit entity.

Musk fired back at Altman with his own filing, saying he would drop his bid for OpenAI altogether if the startup remained a charity.

The legal battle between the two billionaires over OpenAI’s structure began last year. They now await a ruling by US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on Musk’s request to halt OpenAI’s restructuring plans, while he pursues claims that the startup’s relationship with Microsoft Corp. violates antitrust law.

‘Improper Bid’

The unsolicited Feb. 10 offer by Musk and a coalition of deep-pocketed investors to acquire OpenAI shows that his request for a court order immediately blocking OpenAI’s conversion to a for-profit business is “an improper bid to undermine a competitor,” according to Altman’s filing in federal court in Oakland, California.

Altman has spurned the buyout offer, saying OpenAI is “not for sale,” and called the overture by Musk, who owns rival startup xAI, an attempt to “slow us down.”

In response to Altman’s filing, Tesla’s CEO told the court he would drop his bid for OpenAI if the startup halts its restructuring. Altman rejected the proposal before OpenAI’s board had even seen it, Musk said. That is a breach of fiduciary duty, he argued.

If OpenAI’s board “is prepared to preserve the charity’s mission and stipulate to take the ‘for sale’ sign off its assets by halting its conversion, Musk will withdraw the bid,” Musk’s lawyers said in their filing.

“Otherwise, the charity must be compensated by what an arms-length buyer will pay for its assets,” they said.

OpenAI has said shifting from a nonprofit charity to a commercial business is critical to securing the vast amount of funding the ChatGPT maker needs to fulfill its mission of creating artificial general intelligence, or AGI, to benefit humanity.

Skeptical Judge

Rogers signaled at a Feb. 4 hearing that she wasn’t convinced she needs to take immediate action against OpenAI. She said she was reluctant to issue such an order in a “billionaires versus billionaires” case and called Musk’s argument that he faces “irreparable harm” a “stretch.” 

The judge said she will probably let Musk take OpenAI to trial – and require him to testify – over at least some of his claims. Lawyers told her the earliest a trial could take place is in late 2026.

According to OpenAI’s filing, Musk’s move to take control of OpenAI contradicts his position in court that a transfer of the startup’s assets through restructuring would breach its mission as a charitable trust.

“Out of court, those constraints evidently do not apply, so long as Musk and his allies are the buyers,” OpenAI said. “Musk would have OpenAI, Inc. transfer all of its assets to him, for his economic benefit and that of his competing AI business and hand-picked private investors.”

The case is Musk v. Altman, 24-cv-04722, US District Court, Northern District of California (Oakland).

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Washington:

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday took a jab at Elon Musk, who reportedly offered to buy the artificial intelligence startup’s assets for USD 97.4 billion, accusing the Tesla CEO of acting from a “position of insecurity.”

“Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity,” Altman said during an interview with Bloomberg Television on the sidelines of the Paris AI Summit. “I feel for the guy. I don’t think he’s a happy person,” he added in comments cited by multiple US publications, including the New York Post and the Hill.

According to the New York Post, Altman reiterated that OpenAI is “not for sale” after Musk and a group of investors made an unsolicited offer. “The company is not for sale. It’s another one of his tactics to try to mess with us,” he said.

When asked what Musk wants out of the deal during the Bloomberg Television interview, OpenAI CEO said, “He’s probably just trying to slow us down.”

On Monday, The New York Times reported that a group of investors led by Musk made a USD 97.4 billion bid to acquire OpenAI’s assets. In response, Altman took a jibe at the offer on X, saying, “No thank you, but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”
Musk responded by calling Altman a “swindler.”

no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want

— Sam Altman (@sama) February 10, 2025

According to the New York Post, Musk’s attorney Marc Toberoff said that Musk had secured backing from several prominent investors, including venture firms such as Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC, Valor Equity Partners, Baron Capital, Atreides Management, and Vy Capital, as well as Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel.

In a statement, Musk said it was “time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” the publication reported.

The Wall Street Journal first reported news of the offer. Meanwhile, The New York Times, citing a source familiar with OpenAI’s response, reported that the company has not yet reviewed Musk’s bid.

This unsolicited offer could potentially disrupt OpenAI’s efforts to finalise a USD 40 billion funding deal, which would significantly increase the company’s valuation from just four months ago.
The new funding round, led by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, is expected to value OpenAI at USD 300 billion, according to three sources familiar with the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

If completed, this deal would place OpenAI among the most valuable private companies globally, alongside Musk’s SpaceX and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, according to The New York Times.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

New Delhi:

Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s chief Sam Altman is planning to visit India next week, three sources with direct knowledge of the matter said, in what could be his first visit in two years at a time when the company faces legal challenges in the country.

The sources said Altman has scheduled his trip to New Delhi for February 5. One of the sources said a meeting with government officials was also on the cards.

But the schedule is not finalised and his plans could still change, the people said.

OpenAI, India’s IT ministry and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

OpenAI has said India is its second-largest market by number of users, after the United States.

Altman visited India in 2023 when he met Modi in New Delhi and discussed the potential of AI in boosting India’s tech ecosystem.

Since then, OpenAI has faced several legal challenges in India. A lawsuit against it claiming breaches of copyright began last year after local news agency ANI challenged it in a New Delhi court.

Book publishers and almost a dozen digital media outlets, including those owned by billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, have also since joined the case.

OpenAI has said it only uses publicly available data in a manner protected by fair use principles, and has said Indian courts have no jurisdiction to hear the matter.

Separately, a global tech market rout was triggered this week after the emergence of Chinese AI rival DeepSeek. DeepSeek’s AI Assistant has overtaken ChatGPT to become the top-rated free app on Apple’s App Store in the United States.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Mira Murati quit as the Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI on Wednesday. She’s the latest to join a growing list of high-profile exits from the company. Ms Murati’s decision comes after six years with the artificial intelligence pioneer behind ChatGPT.

In a post on X, Ms Murati described her time at OpenAI as “an extraordinary privilege” and her decision to leave as “difficult.” “There’s never an ideal time to walk away from a place one cherishes, but the moment feels right. I want to create the time and space to do my exploration,” she said.

I shared the following note with the OpenAI team today. pic.twitter.com/nsZ4khI06P

— Mira Murati (@miramurati) September 25, 2024

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded with a touching tribute to X, thanking her for her contributions and conveying his support. “It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally,” the CEO wrote. “I feel tremendous gratitude towards her for what she has helped us build and accomplish.” 

He said he was “excited for what she’ll do next.”

I replied with this. Mira, thank you for everything.

It’s hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally.

I feel tremendous gratitude towards her for what she has helped us build and accomplish, but I most of all feel personal…

— Sam Altman (@sama) September 25, 2024

Mira Murati, 35, played a major role in developing ChatGPT and overseeing releases of image generator Dall-E and AI code generator Codex. Her exit comes after her brief tenure as interim CEO following Mr Altman’s ousting last November. 

Sam Altman announced Mark Chen as senior VP of research and Josh Achiam as head of mission alignment to ensure a smooth transition.

Mira Murati’s departure follows those of co-founders Greg Brockman (on extended leave) and John Schulman (joined rival Anthropic), as well as a product team leader and former Meta employee. Earlier this year, co-founder Ilya Sutskever exited OpenAI after a boardroom dispute. Ms Murati’s exit now leaves only two of its 11 founders remaining. 

The shakeup comes as OpenAI releases its new Strawberry AI model, designed to improve “thinking” in generative AI chatbots. The company aims to address “hallucinations” – persuasive but incorrect content – and provide more accurate responses.

OpenAI is releasing a new artificial intelligence model known internally as “Strawberry” that can perform some human-like reasoning tasks, as it looks to stay at the top of a crowded market of rivals.
The new model, called o1, is designed to spend more time computing the answer before responding to user queries, the company said in a blog post Thursday. With the model, OpenAI’s tools should be able to solve multi-step problems, including complicated math and coding questions.

“As an early model, it doesn’t yet have many of the features that make ChatGPT useful, like browsing the web for information and uploading files and images,” the company said. “But for complex reasoning tasks this is a significant advancement and represents a new level of AI capability. Given this, we are resetting the counter back to 1 and naming this series OpenAI o1.”

A preview version of the model will be available through OpenAI’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT, to paid Plus and Team users on Thursday. Bloomberg previously reported the company could release the new model as soon as this week.

The model’s release comes as San Francisco-based OpenAI is looking to raise billions in funding and faces heightened competition in the race to develop ever more sophisticated artificial intelligence systems. OpenAI isn’t the only company working on such capabilities; competitors Anthropic and Google have also touted “reasoning” skills with their advanced AI models.

In its blog post, OpenAI gave examples of the AI model’s responses to questions on topics including coding, English, and math, and asked it to solve a simple crossword puzzle. In a series of posts on X, Noam Brown, a research scientist at OpenAI, said the company is releasing the model in preview now in part to get a sense for how people use it, and where it needs to be improved.

The experience of using OpenAI’s updated AI system will differ somewhat from what people have come to expect with ChatGPT, the company’s chatbot. Before responding to a user’s prompt, the new software will pause for a matter of seconds while, behind the scenes and invisible to the user, it considers a number of related prompts and then summarizes what appears to be the best response. This technique is sometimes referred to as “chain of thought” prompting.

OpenAI has been working to get computers to carry out multi-step actions for some time. In May 2023, for instance, the company released a blog post and an accompanying research paper about its efforts to improve AI systems’ abilities to solve math problems. According to the paper, the company trained a model by rewarding it for each correct step in the process toward coming up with an answer to a problem, rather than by just rewarding it for generating an accurate answer.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

OpenAI, the startup behind the popular ChatGPT, is reportedly in discussions to raise billions of dollars in a new funding round that could see it valued at above $100 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

The funding round is expected to be led by venture capital firm Thrive Capital, which is poised to invest approximately $1 billion, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Tech giant and OpenAI backer Microsoft is also expected to put in money, it added.

OpenAI, Microsoft and Thrive Capital did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

ChatGPT, a chatbot that can generate human-like responses based on user prompts, has driven AI’s popularity and fueled a meteoric rise in the valuation of the San Francisco-based firm.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

OpenAI, responding to questions from US lawmakers, said it’s dedicated to making sure its powerful AI tools don’t cause harm, and that employees have ways to raise concerns about safety practices.

The startup sought to reassure lawmakers of its commitment to safety after five senators including Senator Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, raised questions about OpenAI’s policies in a letter addressed to Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman.

“Our mission is to ensure artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity, and we are dedicated to implementing rigorous safety protocols at every stage of our process,” Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon said Wednesday in a letter to the lawmakers.

Specifically, OpenAI said it will continue to uphold its promise to allocate 20% of its computing resources toward safety-related research over multiple years.

The company, in its letter, also pledged that it won’t enforce non-disparagement agreements for current and former employees, except in specific cases of a mutual non-disparagement agreement. OpenAI’s former limits on employees who left the company have come under scrutiny for being unusually restrictive. OpenAI has since said it has changed its policies.

Altman later elaborated on its strategy on social media.

a few quick updates about safety at openai:

as we said last july, we’re committed to allocating at least 20% of the computing resources to safety efforts across the entire company.

our team has been working with the US AI Safety Institute on an agreement where we would provide…

— Sam Altman (@sama) August 1, 2024

“Our team has been working with the US AI Safety Institute on an agreement where we would provide early access to our next foundation model so that we can work together to push forward the science of AI evaluations,” he wrote on X.

Kwon, in his letter, also cited the recent creation of a safety and security committee, which is currently undergoing a review of OpenAI’s processes and policies.

In recent months, OpenAI has faced a series of controversies around its commitment to safety and ability for employees to speak out on the topic. Several key members of its safety-related teams, including former co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, resigned, along with another leader of the company’s team devoted to assessing long-term safety risks, Jan Leike, who publicly shared concerns that the company was prioritizing product development over safety.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Sam Altman has acknowledged that he heavily relied on advice from his friend, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, to grow OpenAI after ChatGPT became a global sensation. In a joint interview with Mr Chesky at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the OpenAI CEO mentioned that while many people offered help once ChatGPT gained popularity in late 2022, Mr Chesky was the only one who truly pitched in, CNBC Make It reported.

“Everything just went crazy for me,” Mr Altman said. “Brian would sit down with me for about three hours every other week and provide a list of things I needed to do. He’d point out where I was behind, what I was messing up, and what I needed to proactively consider.”

Five days after ChatGPT launched to the public, it surpassed 1 million users. By January 2023, the platform had 100 million monthly active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to CNBC Make It. As the Microsoft-backed artificial intelligence company experienced rapid growth, Chesky became a close confidant, Altman noted. Mr Chesky was “almost always right,” Altman added, saying, “I learned to just always shut up and follow the advice.”

Elaborating on the impact of Mr Chesky’s advice on OpenAI’s business, Altman mentioned that his friend guided him on hiring decisions and how to “map” out the company’s strategy.

Recently, Mr Chesky pointed out that Mr Altman was “probably not thinking enough about” the political consequences of the company’s generative AI technology, the OpenAI CEO said.

New Delhi:

OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, has said it acted within 24 hours to disrupt “deceptive” use of artificial intelligence (AI) in a covert operation that sought to influence the ongoing Lok Sabha elections.

This influence campaign, called “Zero Zeno”, was run by STOIC, a political campaign management firm in Israel.

The threat actors attempted to leverage OpenAI’s powerful language models for tasks like generating comments, articles, social media profiles that criticised the ruling BJP and praised the Congress, the company led by CEO Sam Altman said.

“In May, the network began generating comments that focused on India, criticised the ruling BJP party and praised the opposition Congress party. We disrupted some activity focused on the Indian elections less than 24 hours after it began,” OpenAI said.

OpenAI said it banned a cluster of accounts operated from Israel that were being used to generate and edit content for an influence operation that spanned X, Facebook, Instagram, websites, and YouTube.

“This operation targeted audiences in Canada, the United States and Israel with content in English and Hebrew. In early May, it began targeting audiences in India with English-language content,” the company said.

Responding to the report, the BJP called it a “dangerous threat” to the democracy.

“It is absolutely clear and obvious that @BJP4India was and is the target of influence operations, misinformation and foreign interference, being done by and/or on behalf of some Indian political parties,” said Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar.

“This is very dangerous threat to our democracy. It is clear vested interests in India and outside are clearly driving this and needs to be deeply scrutinized/investigated and exposed. My view at this point is that these platforms could have released this much earlier, and not so late when elections are ending,” he added.

It is absolutely clear and obvious that @BJP4India was and is the target of influence operations, misinformation and foreign interference, being done by and/or on behalf of some Indian political parties.

This is very dangerous threat to our democracy. It is clear vested… https://t.co/e78pbEuHwe

— Rajeev Chandrasekhar (Modiyude Kutumbam) (@Rajeev_GoI) May 31, 2024

OpenAI said it has disrupted five covert operations in the last three months that sought to use our models in support of deceptive activity across the internet. “Our investigations into suspected covert influence operations (IO) are part of a broader strategy to meet our goal of safe AI deployment.”