A federal judge has ruled that Elon Musk’s suit against OpenAI might proceed to trial.
And if and when that happens, the world’s richest man would have to appear in court and testify, Reuters reported Tuesday (Feb. 4).
Musk, who was involved in the founding of the artificial intelligence (AI) leader, is suing to keep the company from becoming a for-profit entity. In court Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said parts of the case can move forward.
“Something is going to trial in this case,” Rogers said. “[Elon Musk will] sit on the stand, present it to a jury, and a jury will decide who is right.”
According to the report, the judge had been weighing Musk’s recent request for a preliminary injunction to prevent OpenAI’s conversion before going to trial.
Musk helped OpenAI CEO Sam Altman found the company in 2015 but left before the startup began to make a name for itself. Musk has since launched rival AI firm xAI, and has argued that OpenAI’s switch to a for-profit company goes against its original mission.
Musk later expanded his suit to include federal antitrust and other claims, and in December asked the judge handling the case to prevent OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit.
OpenAI says the switch is necessary to help it land the types of investments it needs to develop the best AI models. The company has said it would try to dismiss Musk’s claims and that Musk “should be competing in the marketplace rather than the courtroom.”
Reuters said the stakes here have escalated, as the company’s $6.6 billion funding round last year and a new round of up to $25 billion under discussion with SoftBank are dependent on OpenAI’s restructuring to remove the nonprofit’s control.
That sort of transformation and restructuring would be highly unusual, Rose Chan Loui, executive director of the UCLA Law Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofits, told Reuters. Typically, nonprofit to for-profit conversations involve healthcare organizations, not venture-backed companies.
In other recent OpenAI news, the company this weekend debuted an AI tool dubbed “deep research” which the company says is capable of carrying out multistep online research and “accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours.”
Using a version of OpenAI’s upcoming o3 AI model that is designed for web browsing and data analysis, deep research will employ the company’s ChatGPT chatbot to find, analyze and synthesize online sources such as images, text and PDFs to create a report.