All the evidence revealed so far in Musk v. Altman

The Musk v. Altman trial is underway, and that means exhibits, or the evidence to be presented in court, are being revealed piece by piece. So far, email exchanges, photos, and corporate documents are circulating from the earliest days of OpenAI — and from before the AI lab even had a name. Some high-level takeaways: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave OpenAI an in-demand supercomputer, Musk largely drafted OpenAI’s mission and heavily influenced its early structure, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared to want to lean heavily on Y Combinator for early support for OpenAI, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever worried about Musk’s level of control over the company, and Musk highlighted the importance of a nonprofit with a mission of broadly beneficial AI.

Musk’s buzzy lawsuit, which began its jury trial on Monday in a federal courtroom in California, names Altman, Brockman, and OpenAI investor Microsoft as defendants. The claims vary against each party and have included breaching OpenAI’s charitable trust, fraud, and unjust enrichment. But ultimately, Musk’s lawsuit boils down to whether or not OpenAI deviated from its founding mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence — an often vaguely defined term that denotes AI systems that equal or surpass human intelligence — benefits all of humanity. It’s the latest in a yearslong string of legal actions against OpenAI and its executives by Musk, who cofounded the AI lab alongside Altman and Brockman and was an early investor. (Musk also owns xAI, an AI lab that directly competes with OpenAI, and is owned by parent company SpaceX.)