Protected: News

On Monday, the jury in Musk v. Altman dealt Elon Musk a major blow—reaching a unanimous advisory verdict that he had sued OpenAI too late and, as a result, his claims are barred by the applicable statutes of limitations. US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers immediately accepted it. 

Musk announced on X that he will be appealing the decision. “The judge & jury never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality,” he wrote.

OpenAI was cofounded by Musk and a group of researchers in 2015 as a nonprofit with a mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity, unconstrained by a need to generate financial returns. Musk donated $38 million to the company during its early days, allegedly on the basis that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had promised to keep the company a nonprofit committed to the mission.   

Musk brought two claims against OpenAI. First, he argued that Altman and Brockman breached the charitable trust he created through his donations by breaking their promise to keep the company a nonprofit and creating a for-profit subsidiary that ballooned over the years. Second, he argued that Altman and Brockman unjustly enriched themselves at Musk’s expense. He sued OpenAI in 2024. 

Musk asked the court to unwind a 2025 restructuring that converted OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary into a public benefit corporation and to remove Altman and Brockman from their roles.

OpenAI argued that the time for Musk to sue the company had run out before he brought the case. The statute of limitations on the breach of charitable trust claim is three years, while the statute of limitations on the unjust enrichment claim is two years. This means that Musk should have discovered, or had reason to discover, Altman and Brockman’s alleged breach of charitable trust no earlier than 2021 and their alleged unjust enrichment no earlier than 2022. 

While Musk argued he discovered that Altman and Brockman had broken their promise only in 2022, OpenAI claimed that Musk had reason to think this well before 2021. 

Musk told the jury that he has gone through “three phases” in his beliefs about OpenAI: In phase one, he was “enthusiastically supportive” of the company. In phase two, “I started to lose confidence that they were telling me the truth,” he said. In phase three, “I’m sure they’re looting the nonprofit.” 

Here’s a deeper dive into a timeline of the events as testified in the trial. You can read my dispatches from all three weeks of the trial here and here and here. 

2017: Musk proposes creating a for-profit subsidiary

In 2017, two years after OpenAI was founded, Musk and the other cofounders tried to create a for-profit subsidiary to raise enough capital to build artificial general intelligence—powerful AI that can compete with humans on most cognitive tasks. They fought a bitter power battle over who would get to control the entity. Musk also proposed merging OpenAI with his electric-car company, Tesla. 

During the trial, OpenAI’s lawyers pressed Musk on these discussions, suggesting that Musk knew in 2017 about Altman and Brockman’s plans to pivot the company—even participating in such plans—and had reason to sue then.

“I was not opposed to there being a small for-profit that provides funding to the nonprofit,” Musk told the jury, “as long as the tail didn’t wag the dog.” 

2019: OpenAI creates a for-profit subsidiary with capped profits

In 2019, OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary, under which employees and investors would receive a capped return on their investment. At the same time, the company secured a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. OpenAI argued that Musk again had reason to sue the company then. 

But Musk testified that he didn’t think the move was violating the nonprofit’s mission. “If you’ve got a capped-profit situation, it hasn’t violated the nonprofit’s goal,” Musk told the jury earlier in the trial. “There was no basis for me to file a lawsuit at that time.”

2020: Microsoft snags an exclusive license 

In 2020, when Microsoft secured an exclusive license to OpenAI’s GPT-3 model, Musk posted on X: “This does seem like the opposite of open. OpenAI is essentially captured by Microsoft.” OpenAI once again argued that Musk had reason to sue then. 

But Musk testified that after reading the post, Altman reassured him that “OpenAI was staying on the mission as a nonprofit.” Musk said although he was skeptical, he still had no reason to sue the company at that point.

2022: Microsoft prepares to invest $10 billion in OpenAI

It was only in 2022, Musk testified, that he discovered OpenAI had abandoned its nonprofit mission. At that time, Microsoft was preparing to invest $10 billion in OpenAI—a deal that closed in 2023. 

“I was disturbed to see OpenAI with a $20B valuation,” Musk texted Altman after reading the news. “This is a bait and switch.”

Musk told the jury this was the moment that made him realize “the for-profit is the tail wagging the dog.” He thought Microsoft would give $10 billion only if it expected “a very big financial return.” He argued that this was the point he realized “OpenAI had become, for all intents and purposes, a for-profit company with a $20 billion valuation.” 

“The 2023 deal was different,” Steven Molo, one of Musk’s lawyers, hammered home during his closing argument.

The jury sides with OpenAI

It was up to the jury to decide whether the evidence supported Musk’s claim that he first realized in 2023 that OpenAI was no longer a nonprofit committed to its mission. In the verdict announced today, they found Musk did in fact have reason to think that he was being misled by Altman and Brockman before 2021. They did not address whether he was in fact misled. 

Courts often decide cases on procedural grounds like statutes of limitations when they can, because it can be the cleaner way to resolve a case than to grapple with its merits.

Musk has said he will appeal the decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a federal appellate court that reviews decisions from district courts in California and other states.

The defense-tech company Anduril has shared new details about the augmented-reality headset for the military it’s prototyping with Meta, including a vision for ordering drone strikes via eye-tracking and voice commands.

Quay Barnett, who leads the efforts as a vice president at Anduril following a career in the Army’s Special Operations Command, says his fundamental goal is to optimize “the human as a weapons system.” The vision is undoubtedly cyborg-inspired: Barnett wants drones and soldiers to see together, share information seamlessly, and make decisions as one. 

Anduril actually has two such projects in the works. The first is the Army’s Soldier Born Mission Command, or SBMC, for which the company won a $159 million prototyping contract last year to work with Meta on augmented-reality glasses to attach to existing military helmets. But Anduril has also embarked on a self-funded side quest, announced in October, to design its own helmet and headset combo called EagleEye. This is something the military has not asked for, but Anduril insists it will prefer it and purchase it in the end.

So far, both systems are years away. The Army isn’t expected to move its top choice for the SBMC program into production until 2028, if it picks one at all (the previous lead for the effort, Microsoft, was set to receive a $22 billion production contract that was ultimately cancelled when the glasses didn’t prove viable). But Barnett told MIT Technology Review about where both Anduril’s prototypes are headed.

Depending on the situation, the glasses for either prototype will overlay certain information onto a soldier’s field of view. This might be as simple as a compass or as complex as an entire map of the area, information about where nearby drones are flying, or AI-driven recognition of a target like a truck. 

The soldier would then speak to the interface in plain language—for example, to order an evacuation for someone who’s been injured or to plan a route taking into account which areas are off limits. A large language model—Anduril is in tests with Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and even Anthropic’s Claude, despite the company’s conflict with the Pentagon—will be used to help translate a soldier’s speech into commands the software can follow. And the engine for it all will be Anduril’s software Lattice, which incorporates data from lots of different military hardware into one picture. The Army announced in March that it would spend $20 billion to integrate Lattice with essentially its entire infrastructure.

Barnett’s team is designing the headset to carry out multi-step tasks. A soldier might send a drone to surveil an area and instruct it to come back once it’s found something that looks like an artillery unit; then the system would recommend courses of action, like sending a nearby drone to strike, that would have to be approved by the normal chain of command. Leading the system through this, if all goes to plan, might not even require speech; the soldier could instead communicate through tracked eye movements and subtle taps.

That’s the idea, anyway. It’s worked on early prototypes, Barnett says, but there aren’t yet versions ready for the Army to test at scale. The component parts began arriving in March. Because of federal military contracting rules, these parts—unlike Meta’s commercial smart glasses—required new supply chains that don’t rely on Chinese companies.

It’s a lot for soldiers already bogged down in information overload, says Jonathan Wong, a former US Marine who works as a senior policy researcher at RAND on Army efforts to buy new tech. Both smart glasses projects aim to create a clean interface that presents only the right information at the right time. But it’s a product that soldiers will reject if it costs more of their attention than it saves. “How much mental bandwidth do you have to be both aware of your surroundings and to operate this technology in a way that makes you and your whole unit better?” he says.

Wong recalls that as a platoon commander, for example, he had a radio that operated on three different channels at once. “The moment that two people were on different channels talking at the same time, I immediately couldn’t comprehend anything that either one of them was trying to tell me, and I was probably not aware of my own surroundings,” he says. “I think there are limits to what you can take in.”

Ideally, Barnett says, smart glasses can ease that information overload. Anduril’s approach is to get creative with ways the user can access necessary information quickly. Voice commands and eye tracking are a piece of that strategy. But even if it’s all technically feasible, it might take years of field testing to know if the system is actually useful for soldiers, Wong says. 

Such a system would mark a major escalation in how closely soldiers rely on imperfect AI systems. While computer vision models used to identify objects have long been employed by militaries, and chatbots have recently entered decision-making during the war in Iran, these technologies have not yet made their way to most frontline soldiers. A smart glasses system tasked with identifying threats and recommending strikes would introduce massive new risks of errors. 

Anduril is not the only one competing to develop smart goggles for combat. Rivet, which specializes in wearable sensors for the military, received a $195 million prototyping contract the same time, and in March the Israeli defense-tech company Elbit received its own $120 million contract. This all comes after Microsoft lost its role leading the Army’s smart glasses effort, following a Pentagon audit that found the Army wasn’t properly testing the glasses, a mistake that could have wasted $22 billion.

For both Anduril’s prototypes, the company is testing a new system for digital night vision, which uses electronic sensors and algorithms to boost low levels of light. It’s been a promised technology for decades but has tended to work too slowly for practical use and produce grainy images. Anduril says it has found improvements over previous prototypes through techniques rooted in both new generative AI and older machine learning. 

Much of the other hardware for both projects is being built by Meta, including the displays and the waveguides that send visuals to the user’s eye without blocking the view. That might be a surprise to anyone who knows the backstory: In 2017, Facebook (now Meta) ousted Anduril founder Palmer Luckey following an internal conflict involving his support for Donald Trump. The two are now back in the augmented-reality business together, while Mark Zuckerberg has also adopted a friendlier posture toward the second Trump administration.

For the Army initiative, this suite of smart glasses, night vision, and sensors will be attached to the helmets and other gear soldiers already wear, with a separate battery pack. The EagleEye version will instead incorporate the tech into the helmet itself. Even if the Army doesn’t prefer EagleEye in the end, Barnett says, Anduril will attempt to sell the system to foreign militaries.

Multiple challenges must still be overcome. Unlike Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, the prototypes have to operate in an environment full of dust, explosions, and smoke. Adding the computing power and battery life they need also means more weight for soldiers already carrying upwards of 100 pounds. Then the technology has to work in environments without ubiquitous 5G cell connections; powerful computer vision and AI models will need to run locally on the device.

For the Army to want to buy it at scale, “it’s got to work, and it’s got to be pretty seamless,” Wong says. “It’s a high bar.”