Elon Musk acknowledged there was no written agreement or contract with OpenAI regarding the terms of his donation to the company when it was first founded as a nonprofit research organization more than a decade ago.
Under questioning from OpenAI attorney William Savitt, Musk said he did not have his representatives prepare a document to lay out the conditions for the money he committed to OpenAI in its early days. Asked again whether he had done so, Musk said he “reviewed the corporate charter, which said it is a nonprofit.”
“At the end of the day, you can't steal a charity,” he said, repeating his refrain from earlier in his testimony.
The tense questioning kicked off Musk's third day of testimony in a closely watched trial over his claims that OpenAI betrayed its altruistic mission in pursuit of profit. In the lawsuit he filed in 2024, Musk alleged that Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief executive officer, and Greg Brockman, its president, have enriched themselves by converting the company to a for-profit business with billions of dollars in support from Microsoft Corp.
OpenAI and Altman have accused Musk of harassment and say the real goal of the lawsuit is to undercut competition with his own startup that he co-founded in 2023, xAI.
When announcing its launch in 2015, the nonprofit said Musk committed to eventually donating as much as $1 billion to its mission to develop artificial intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.” In a post on X in 2023, Musk wrote that he had donated $100 million. The actual amount was far less. “In strict monetary terms, I contributed $38 million,” Musk said this week.
Much of Musk's testimony to date has been about his falling out with OpenAI's leaders as they explored strategies to line up sufficient funding to compete with Alphabet Inc.'s Google and other pioneers in the AI space that were operating as for-profits.
Musk left OpenAI's board in 2018 and went on to launch xAI as a for-profit five years later. xAI's flagship chatbot, Grok, is known for its irreverant responses and previously ignited a global uproar for generating non-consensual explicit photos.
OpenAI's lawyer asked Musk whether he believes his companies — including SpaceX and Tesla Inc. — are good for society, pointing at how he's posted about AI and robots being beneficial for humanity. Musk replied yes to all.
“There are many possible futures. Some futures are good and some are not good,” he said. “It is better to err on the side of optimism.”
Musk also said xAI has “partly” distilled some of OpenAI's technology for developing its own models by using their AI to validate and compare chatbot responses. Bloomberg News has reported that xAI engineers have also used Anthropic's models for coding.
Before Musk returned to the stand, his attorney Steven Molo argued with US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers over whether an expert witness could testify about potential existential risks from AI, including human extinction. Gonzalez Rogers rejected his argument.
“It is also ironic that your client, despite these risks, is creating a company that's in the exact space,” she said. “I suspect there are plenty of people who don't want to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk's hands. But it doesn't matter. We aren't going to get into those issues.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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