May 12 (Reuters) – OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman will take the witness stand on Tuesday and Wednesday, the California court said, in a clash of tech titans over Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the company.
The trial, in its third week, may determine the future of OpenAI and its leadership, at a time when the company has raised hundreds of billions of dollars from large tech companies and investors, seeking to build out its computing power ahead of a potential trillion-dollar IPO.
Musk’s lawsuit alleges Altman and the AI startup persuaded him into giving $38 million to nonprofit OpenAI, only for the organization to abandon its charitable mission to benefit humanity and instead become a for-profit corporation. OpenAI says Musk knew about the for-profit plan but wanted control.
The faceoff has generated interest throughout Silicon Valley and beyond, with testimony at times focusing on the personalities and leadership styles of the two men. Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever testified on Monday that he spent about a year gathering evidence for the ChatGPT maker’s board that Altman had displayed a “consistent pattern of lying,” for instance.
Several other key witnesses, including current and former OpenAI executives, have testified in the trial so far, among them President Greg Brockman, former OpenAI technology chief Mira Murati and Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member who is also mother to four of Musk’s children.
Musk, who is seeking the removal of Altman and Brockman from their roles, has testified that OpenAI was his idea before executives looted it, saying his funding towards OpenAI was “specifically meant to be for a charity”.
Musk also said while he knew about early discussions on turning OpenAI into a for-profit company, he was reassured by Altman that it would remain a nonprofit.
(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru, Deepa Seetharam and Kenrick Cai in Oakland, California; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
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