LOS ANGELES—A contentious battle years in the making between Tesla owner Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman will next week land before a federal court in Oakland, California, where nine jurors will be asked to decide whether Altman and others betrayed OpenAI’s founding mission as a nonprofit artificial intelligence lab dedicated to the public good.
The outcome could have a profound impact, not just for OpenAI—the creator of ChatGPT, currently valued at $852 billion and poised for a public offering—but for the broader, dizzyingly high-stakes race to advance AI technology and dominate the commercial market.
Musk, who cofounded OpenAI in 2015 and served as an early investor, sued cofounders Altman and Greg Brockman, alleging that they bilked him of tens of millions of dollars with the false promise that the project would remain an open-source nonprofit—and act as a safety hatch on the “grave threat” posed by profit-driven advancement of artificial general intelligence (AGI)….