Musk lost the court battle against Sam Altman and OpenAI: his lawsuit was dismissed due to statute of limitations

The ruling puts an end to one of the most relevant judicial processes so far within the industry. artificial intelligence and closes, at least for now, a dispute that exposed the internal tensions behind the birth and growth of the company that created ChatGPT.

A federal court jury Oaklandin California, concluded this Monday that the facts reported by Musk had prescribed. For this reason, he rejected the presentation against the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the president of the company, Greg Brockman; the OpenAI Foundation; y Microsoft.

The judge Yvonne González Rogers accepted and confirmed the jury’s verdict.

The resolution comes after three weeks of hearings which were marked by crossovers between Musk and the directors of OpenAI, revelations about the organization’s internal affairs and testimonies about how the company evolved from its creation in 2015 to becoming one of the central actors in the global race for artificial intelligence.

During the trial, Musk sought to present himself as one of the original promoters of OpenAI and maintained that he had supported the project with the intention of developing artificial intelligence beneficial to humanity.

“I came up with the idea, the name, I recruited the key people, I taught them everything I know and I provided all the initial financing,” declared the founder of SpaceX when referring to the beginnings of OpenAI.

In another part of his presentation, Musk claimed to have delivered “$38 million for essentially nothing”money that, he said, was used to build “an $800 billion company.” “I was literally an idiot.”he added, attributing his situation to naivety.

The businessman also showed discomfort during some interrogations and accused OpenAI’s lawyers of try to trick him with certain questions. In one of those exchanges, one of the lawyers responded: “Mr. Musk, you are a brilliant person.”

On the other side, Sam Altman He took advantage of his statement to respond to the accusations and question the version of the owner of Tesla and X.

The CEO of OpenAI stated that in 2017 Musk asked to control “90% of the shares” of the organization and stated that he never wanted to leave a power-sharing scheme in writing.

“We did not believe that artificial general intelligence should be under the control of a single person,” Altman said during his testimony.

The audience also focused on Greg Brockmanpresident and co-founder of OpenAI. His old personal notebooks were used by Musk’s lawyers to try to demonstrate that within the organization there were discussions about converting the foundation into a company with profit and move forward without the South African businessman.

According to fragments read during the trial, Brockman wrote phrases linked to “make money”transform OpenAI “into a commercial company without” Musk and “steal the foundation.”

However, Brockman rejected that these texts were compromising. “There is nothing there that embarrasses me,” he responded from the stand.

The executive also recalled an episode that occurred in 2017 and assured that he came to think that Musk could hit him. “I really thought he was going to hit me,” he said.

Another of the testimonies that attracted attention was that of Shivon Zilisformer OpenAI board member from 2020 to 2023 and mother of four of Musk’s children.

During the trial, OpenAI singled her out as a possible informant of the entrepreneur within the company. Part of the discussion revolved around messages exchanged with Musk and Altman that, according to the defense, could demonstrate that the magnate knew long before the direction the company was taking.

That point was central because it could directly impact the legal deadlines of the lawsuit. Finally, the jury concluded that the facts reported were statute-barred and decided to dismiss the case without discussing the merits of the accusations.

The judicial dispute had been closely followed in Silicon Valley due to the weight of its protagonists and the implications it could have for the artificial intelligence industry, at a time when OpenAI and Microsoft maintain a dominant position in the sector thanks to the advancement of ChatGPT and other generative AI systems.