Altman takes stand in Musk's OpenAI nonprofit-to-profit lawsuit

Sam Altman testified in federal court this week as a defendant in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI. Altman, the company's CEO, and Greg Brockman, its president, are primary defendants in the jury trial being heard in California. All three men were part of OpenAI's founding team in 2015; Musk served as an early investor before leaving the board in 2018.

Musk's lawsuit centers on OpenAI's 2019 restructuring from a nonprofit research organization to a capped-profit subsidiary model, which allowed the company to raise billions from Microsoft while maintaining a nonprofit parent. Musk has argued the shift violated the organization's original charter to develop artificial general intelligence as a public good. The courtroom proceedings put OpenAI's governance evolution under oath, with Altman and Brockman facing direct questioning about internal communications and board decisions from that period.

The trial highlights a core tension in AI development: the gap between nonprofit research ideals and the capital requirements of frontier model training. OpenAI's early releases—including GPT-2 weights in 2019—were framed as open research contributions. The company's decision to keep GPT-3 and GPT-4 behind API-only access marked a sharp departure. Competing open-weight efforts like Meta's Llama releases have since filled some of that gap, but the trial puts a legal spotlight on whether the original nonprofit mission was binding.