It is “a clear victory for OpenAIâ€résume The Washington Post. Elon Musk lost his resounding lawsuit in California on Monday May 18 against the creators of ChatGPT, whom he accused of having misappropriated his donations to build a commercial AI giant and betray their original non-profit vocation.
After three weeks of hearings, marked by the questioning of five Silicon Valley billionaires, a popular jury ruled in two hours in favor of OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, “closing a case that captivated the world of Tech†note The Wall Street Journal.
The nine jurors unanimously considered that the Tesla boss had been aware of the facts alleged against OpenAI several years before his complaint but that he had filed it outside the legal deadlines. Musk sued in 2024, five years after the commercial turn of OpenAI, which he created, with Altman and others, as a non-profit foundation in December 2015.
The federal court of Oakland, near San Francisco, “confirms that she accepts the jury’s conclusions as her ownâ€reacted Monday federal judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. The jury’s opinion was only advisory but the magistrate declared that she would follow it on this preliminary question.
“A lesson in the dangers of procrastinationâ€
Les jurés ont donné à Elon Musk “a lesson in the dangers of procrastinationâ€ironically The New York Times. But for the American daily, this decision means above all that OpenAI is now “free to continue its developmentâ€.
The jury’s recommendations “now remove one of the main threats that weighed… on the company led by Sam Altman: that of“a possible restructuringâ€underlines TechCrunch.
The New York Times recalls that the boss of Tesla “claimed $150 billion in damages and wanted Sam Altman removed from the company’s board of directors. It also demanded that OpenAI reverse its decision to become a for-profit company before a possible IPO…. If Musk’s complaint had been successful, the billionaire “would have dealt a serious blow to OpenAIâ€which “could have changed the course of the AI raceâ€estimates the newspaper
In a message published on X after the verdict, Elon Musk nevertheless appeared to present the jurors’ recommendations “like a moral victoryâ€observe TechCrunch. “There is no doubt that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman [le président d'OpenAI] actually enriched themselves by embezzlement from a charitable organization. The only question is WHEN they did it! â€wrote the billionaire, announcing that he was going to appeal.
Leaders “incapable of maintaining honest relationshipsâ€
The verdict was delivered Monday after 11 days of testimony and pleadings during which Musk and Altman clashed, accusing each other of being more interested in money than in the public interest. “During the final arguments, both camps took turns trying to present their adversaries as untrustworthy people,†observe the Wall Street Journal. “Five witnesses during this trial called him a liar under oath…a déclaré l’avocat Steven Molo à propos de Sam Altman. “To succeed in AI, it seems all Mr. Musk knows how to do is come to court…a lancé de son côté l’avocat d’OpenAI, William Savitt.
“From a strictly legal point of view, these three weeks of testimony led to nothing… concludes Hayden Field, journalist for the specialized site The Verge. “But this trial delivered a broader and starker conclusion: almost no one in this case seems trustworthy. Some of the most powerful players in tech seem incapable of maintaining honest relationships with each other. And if that’s true, it raises a larger question: Why do they control a multi-trillion dollar industry set to radically transform our lives? â€.
