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Musk v. Altman week 2: OpenAI fires back, and Shivon Zilis reveals that Musk tried to poach Sam Altman

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In the second week of the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, Musk’s motivations for bringing the suit were under scrutiny.

Last week, Musk took the stand, alleging that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had deceived him into donating $38 million to the company. He claimed that they’d promised to maintain it as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the benefit of humanity, only to later accept billions of dollars of investment from Microsoft and restructure the company to operate a for-profit subsidiary.  

This week, Brockman fired back with his side of the story, arguing that Musk had actually pushed for OpenAI to create a for-profit arm and fought a bitter battle to have “absolute control” over it. OpenAI has argued that Musk is suing because he didn’t get his way and is now trying to undermine a competitor to his own AI company, xAI.

Shivon Zilis, a former OpenAI board member and the mother of four of Musk’s children, also testified, revealing that Musk tried to recruit OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to lead a new AI lab at his electric-car company, Tesla. 

Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015 with Altman, Brockman, and others but left in 2018. Now, he’s asking the court to remove Altman and Brockman from their roles and to unwind the restructuring OpenAI undertook last year, which converted its for-profit subsidiary into a public benefit corporation. He is also seeking as much as $134 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, OpenAI’s investor. 

The outcome of the trial could upend OpenAI’s race toward an IPO at a valuation approaching $1 trillion. Meanwhile, xAI, which Musk founded in 2023, is now a division of his rocket company, SpaceX; the combined companies are also expected to go public as early as June, at a target valuation of $1.75 trillion.

On Monday, Brockman walked into the courtroom in a blue suit and tie, holding hands with his wife, Anna Brockman. On the stand, he was serene, even chipper, as he recalled OpenAI’s early days. But he grew agitated under impassioned questioning from Elon Musk’s lawyer, Steven Molo. Altman listened in silence, while Anna Brockman sat behind him, fidgeting. Outside the courthouse, protesters rallying against the AI race sang hymns over the voices of lawyers giving press conferences.

Two days before trial began, according to Brockman, Musk messaged him to ask if he would be interested in settling. When Brockman suggested that both sides drop their claims, Musk texted back: “By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be.”

Musk stormed out with a Tesla painting

Last week, Musk testified that he’s suing to save OpenAI’s nonprofit mission to develop AI safely, but he said he was open to seeing OpenAI become a capped-profit company with moderate investments from Microsoft. 

This week, Brockman told the jury that Musk was never truly committed to keeping OpenAI a nonprofit. In the summer of 2017, when an AI model that OpenAI built beat the world’s best players in a video game called Dota 2, Musk hosted a gathering at his “Haunted Mansion” near San Francisco. The house was splattered with confetti and cups, Brockman recalled, and the actress Amber Heard, who was Musk’s girlfriend at the time, served whiskey.

“Time to make the next step for OpenAI. This is the triggering event,” Musk wrote in an email—having said weeks earlier that if OpenAI made a major public achievement, it would be “time to create a for-profit,” Brockman told the jury.

Over the next six weeks, Brockman said, Musk and the other cofounders had intense discussions about creating a for-profit entity to raise enough capital to build artificial general intelligence—powerful AI that can compete with humans on most cognitive tasks. Musk wanted to have majority equity in the entity and the right to choose a majority of the board members. He also wanted to be its CEO, said Brockman. 

Brockman testified that in August 2017, he and other cofounders gathered to hash out the terms of the for-profit structure. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist at the time, arrived bearing a painting of a Tesla as a “token of goodwill” in return for the actual Teslas Musk had given them days earlier. “It felt a little bit like [Musk] was buttering us up, right,that he wanted us to feel indebted to him,” Brockman told the jury.

When Brockman and Sutskever proposed that they all have equal shares of equity, said Brockman, Musk fell silent and finally said, “I decline.” Musk then stood up and “stormed around the table,” he said. “I actually thought he was going to hit me.” Musk grabbed the painting and walked out. 

Brockman said that afterwards he struggled to decide whether to continue building OpenAI with Musk or break away. “There was a fork in the road,” he said. “Do we accept Elon’s terms? Or do we reject the terms, he quits to create his own, and then we create our own?”

“The one thing we could not accept was to hand him unilateral, absolute control, potentially, over the AGI,” Brockman told the jury.

What was Brockman thinking?

In his theatrical baritone, Molo argued that Brockman was motivated by greed rather than a commitment to OpenAI’s nonprofit mission to develop AI that benefits humanity. He noted that while Brockman never invested money in the company, he now owns a stake worth close to $30 billion. 

“Solving for the mission has always been my primary motivation,” Brockman said, pushing back on Molo’s characterization of him. “It remains so today.” 

Molo pulled up Brockman’s electronic journal on a screen in the courtroom, trying to show the jury what Brockman was really thinking behind the scenes. In 2017, while negotiating with Musk about the future of OpenAI, Brockman wrote about wanting to become a billionaire: “Financially what will take me to $1B?” 

“Why didn’t you take the $29 billion and donate it to the nonprofit that you had a fiduciary duty to, for the good of humanity?” Molo asked Brockman, raising his voice to dramatize moral indignation. 

Molo then pulled up a journal entry Brockman had written in November 2017, while he was torn over whether to turn OpenAI into a for-profit without Musk: “it’d be wrong to steal the nonprofit from him. to convert to a b-corp without him. that’d be pretty morally bankrupt.” Brockman and Musk had previously considered creating a b-corp, which is a for-profit company that pursues a social mission.

Brockman explained, “I meant it would actually serve the mission, but it’d be hard to look at yourself in the mirror.”

Molo also tried to undermine Brockman’s credibility by revealing that he holds a stake in multiple companies with business ties to OpenAI, including the AI company Cerebras, the cloud provider CoreWeave, and the nuclear fusion startup Helion Energy. Altman has tried to steer OpenAI into deals with companies that he invests in, including Helion and the rocket maker Stoke Space, drawing scrutiny over potential conflicts of interest.

Former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati and former OpenAI board member Helen Toner both appeared in video depositions. They addressed the brief firing of Altman in 2023, saying that they could not trust him because of his alleged history of lying. Murati’s text messages with Altman from that time, which were introduced as evidence, revealed his desperate attempts to understand what was happening and regain control. 

Musk plotted a rival AI lab at Tesla

After Brockman’s two days of testimony, Shivon Zilis, who left OpenAI’s board in 2023, took the stand in a black jacket and black jeans, appearing composed but with a flicker of nerves. OpenAI’s lawyer Sarah Eddy asked her in a deceptively soothing voice whether she acted as a conduit for Musk as he tried to poach OpenAI’s cofounders to work at a new AI lab within Tesla. Eddy argued that Musk is suing OpenAI only to undermine a competitor in the AI race. 

Zilis said she met Musk while working at OpenAI as an informal advisor in 2016, and that they had a “one-off” romantic encounter. In 2017, she joined Tesla and Musk’s brain-implant company, Neuralink. In 2020, she joined OpenAI’s board of directors. She became pregnant with Musk’s children through IVF but did not disclose her ties with Musk to OpenAI until Business Insider reported them in 2022. 

By late 2017, Musk had concluded that OpenAI was unlikely to build AGI and pivoted to building an AI lab at Tesla, according to an email sent to Zilis. 

Eddy pulled up a draft of an FAQ document that Zilis emailed a colleague at Tesla in 2017 about an event the company was organizing at the NeurIPS AI conference: “The purpose of this event is to share that Tesla is building a world leading AI lab(?) which will rival the likes of Google/DeepMind and Facebook AI Research.” 

Zilis told the jury that when Musk was still on OpenAI’s board, he tried to recruit Altman to lead that prospective AI lab. Musk had asked Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI research scientist he’d recruited to work at Tesla, “to send a list of top OpenAI people to poach,” according to a text message by Zilis. 

“There is little chance of OpenAI being a serious force if I focus on TeslaAI,” Musk texted Zilis in 2018, just before he left OpenAI. Tesla’s AI lab never came to fruition.

Eddy pressed Zilis about whom she was loyal to when she was working for OpenAI and Musk at the same time. “I had an allegiance to the best outcome for AI for humanity,” Zilis told the jury.

What’s going on next week?

Next week, Ilya Sutskever will testify, as will Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The lawyers for both Musk and OpenAI will deliver their closing arguments. The jury will begin deliberating the week after and deliver an advisory verdict guiding the judge to decide the case.

This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s ongoing coverage of the Musk v. Altman trial. Follow @techreview or @michelletomkim on X for up-to-the-minute reporting.

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Here’s what you need to know about the cruise ship hantavirus outbreak

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MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.

Eight passengers aboard a Dutch-flagged cruise ship have contracted a type of hantavirus, a rare virus transmitted by rats. Three of them have died. As the ship prepares to dock in the Canary Islands, plans are being finalized to let the remaining passengers and crew disembark safely.

The virus in question appears to have a high fatality rate. Read on for answers to the big questions surrounding the outbreak—and to hear why health experts don’t expect a rerun of the covid-19 pandemic.

What is hantavirus?

Hantaviruses are a group of viruses that typically infect rodents but can be transmitted to humans through exposure to the animals or their droppings, urine, or saliva. The viruses don’t seem to cause illness in rodents, but they can make people very unwell. The symptoms can depend on the type of hantavirus a person has been exposed to. Varieties found in the Americas can cause hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome, which affects the lungs and heart and has a fatality rate of up to 50%.

That condition made headlines last year when it caused the death of pianist Betsy Arakawa, the wife of actor Gene Hackman. 

How many cases have there been so far?

On April 6, a man aboard the MV Hondius developed respiratory symptoms. He became very unwell and died just five days later. His wife, who left the ship at the island of Saint Helena, also developed symptoms. Her health deteriorated during a flight to Johannesburg, South Africa, and she died the following day, on April 26. South Africa’s National Institute of Communicable Diseases tested samples taken from the woman and confirmed that she had hantavirus.

A third person aboard the ship, who developed symptoms on April 28, died on May 2. Four other passengers who became ill were evacuated—one to South Africa and three to the Netherlands.

An eighth person had disembarked in Saint Helena and reported similar symptoms once he was in Zurich, Switzerland. A team at Geneva University Hospitals confirmed that he had become ill from the Andes virus—a form of hantavirus that can be spread between people.

Could this be the start of the next pandemic?

Health experts don’t believe so. They stress that the situation is nothing like the one the coronavirus that causes covid-19 presented in 2020. For a start, the Andes virus is not a mysterious new virus—scientists already have an understanding of it, and Argentina is sharing diagnostic kits it has already developed.

The virus also doesn’t spread in the same way. Officials at the World Health Organization emphasized that the spread of hantavirus requires close contact—the kind a person might have with a partner, household member, or medical caregiver.

The cruise ship outbreak represents “a specific confined setting where people are interacting in a prolonged close contact,” Abdirahman Mahamud, the alert and response director for the WHO’s health emergency program, said at a press event on Thursday. “With the experience our member states have, and the actions they have taken, we believe that this will not lead to a subsequent chain of transmission.”

What about the rest of the people onboard the ship?

All the remaining passengers have been asked to stay in their cabins, which the WHO says are being disinfected. Doctors and health professionals from the WHO and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control have boarded the ship and are assessing everyone on board.

So far, no one else on board has developed symptoms, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO acting director for epidemic and pandemic management, said at the press event. That’s “a good sign,” she said, but she added that the Andes virus has a long incubation period (around six weeks). Passengers are being advised to wear a medical mask when they leave their rooms.

At the same event, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he was in regular contact with the ship’s captain, who was reporting that “morale had increased significantly” since the ship started its journey to the Canary Islands.

What do we know about the Andes virus?

The Andes virus is the only hantavirus that is known to be transmitted between people. That transmission seems to rely on prolonged, intimate contact.

There was an Andes virus outbreak in Argentina around eight years ago. Between November 2018 and February 2019, there were 34 confirmed cases of infection, and 11 deaths. That outbreak was triggered when a person with symptoms attended a social gathering, said Tedros. “We are in a similar situation right now,” he said. “A cluster in a confined space with close contact.”

The fact that the 2018 outbreak was limited to 34 cases should be somewhat reassuring, he implied. “We believe this will be a limited outbreak if the public health measures are implemented and solidarity is shown across all countries,” he said.

How is hantavirus treated?

Unfortunately, we don’t have any specific antiviral treatments or vaccines for hantavirus. The WHO recommends early intensive care for people who develop symptoms. “This can save lives,” Anaïs Legand, WHO technical lead on viral hemorrhagic fevers, said on Thursday.

How did people get infected in the first place?

We don’t yet have an answer to that. But we do know that the couple who died had traveled through Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay on a birdwatching trip before they boarded the ship. That trip included visits to areas where species of rats that carry the Andes virus are known to live. The WHO is working with authorities in Argentina to try to retrace the couple’s movements on that trip.

Has the virus spread beyond the ship?

We don’t yet know for sure. The WHO is receiving reports of “potential suspect cases,” Van Kerkhove said at the Thursday briefing. Some of them have links to the ship or its passengers. Each “alert” will be followed up by health authorities in the relevant country, she said.

Has the US withdrawal from WHO affected anything?

Five US states have said they are monitoring US nationals who have disembarked from the ship. WHO officials are stressing that they are still sharing technical information with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Things are … as they used to be,” Tedros said. “WHO’s mission is to help the world to be safe … and we want the American people to be safe as well.”

But it’s worth noting that cuts made by the Trump administration aren’t exactly putting the US in a good position for events like these. Last year, all full-time employees in the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program—which helps prevent and control illness outbreaks on cruise ships—were laid off. Further cuts to the CDC have left public health experts worried about how ill prepared the US is to deal with future disease outbreaks.

What will happen next?

Any suspected cases will be monitored by health authorities. Passengers are due to disembark in Tenerife in the Canary Islands on Sunday, May 10, and the WHO has said it will work with the Spanish government to ensure that the risk to residents remains low and that the passengers are treated with dignity and respect.

In the meantime, scientists are working to fully sequence the genome of the virus from patient samples. They want to find out if it is different from the viruses involved in the previous cases. “So far, we haven’t seen anything unusual,” said Van Kerkhove.

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The Download: AI malaise and babymaking tech

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This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

We’ve entered the era of AI malaise

AI is spreading everywhere, and it is not going away. But what will it do? What effect will it have on our society? Will it make life better, or worse? How will we know? What’s the plan?

This technology may very well take our jobs—or just crash the economy instead. Our apps are all getting injections of AI, like it or not. And it is increasingly impossible to tell whether we are relying too much on AI or not using it enough.

We’re all sitting uncomfortably with AI right now. Read our essay on the strange, uncertain mood of the moment.

The era of AI malaise is an essay written by our editor-in-chief Mat Honan. It accompanies MIT Technology Review’s 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now, our list of the big ideas, trends, and advances in the field that are driving progress today—and will shape what’s possible tomorrow.

Here’s how technology transformed babymaking

Technology is changing the way we make babies. Clinicians have improved hormonal treatments. Embryologists have devised ways to culture embryos in the lab for longer. IVF clinics today offer multiple genetic tests for embryos.

The technology has also had a huge social impact, allowing for changes in the structure of families and providing more reproductive choices for would-be parents. Now, AI and robots are set to usher in another new era for IVF.

Here’s how technology is reshaping babymaking.

—Jessica Hamzelou

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly newsletter giving you the inside track on all things biotech. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

How robots learn: a brief, contemporary history

For decades, researchers have been inspired by science fiction robots that can move through the world, adapt to different environments, and interact with people. But bringing these devices into the messiness of the real world has proved incredibly difficult.

Now, advances in AI are changing that. Instead of relying on rigid rules, robots are learning through trial and error, simulations, and huge amounts of real-world data. The progress represents a revolution in how machines interact with their surroundings.

It also means that Silicon Valley roboticists are dreaming big again. Here’s how we got here. 

—James O’Donnell

This story is from the latest issue of our print magazine, which is all about nature. Subscribe now to read it in full.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 ICE plans to develop its own smart glasses
The “ICE Glasses” would identify people in real time. (404 Media)
+ ICE already uses an app with facial recognition to track citizens. (NYT $)
+ A new lawsuit wants to stop ICE using DNA to track critics. (Ars Technica)

2 AI is distorting key economic signals
It makes growth look better and the job market look worse. (WSJ $)
+ Welcome to the economic singularity. (MIT Technology Review)

3 A cyberattack paralyzed thousands of schools
And stole 275 million people’s data from edtech platform Canvas. (NYT $)
+ The digital learning software is used across the US. (CNN)
+ It’s the worst case scenario from an attack on one education platform. (Wired $)

4 The US suspects Nvidia chips were smuggled to Alibaba via Thailand
Super Micro servers containing Nvidia chips were allegedly smuggled. (Bloomberg $)
+ Through a firm linked to Thailand’s national AI initiative. (Reuters $)

5 China’s affordable AI models are increasingly worrying Silicon Valley
They’re often cheaper and more adaptable than US rivals. (Bloomberg $)
+ China is betting big on open source. (MIT Technology Review)

6 Scientists developed a new energy storage system inspired by sunburn
It stores solar energy by mimicking molecular changes in damaged DNA. (BBC)
+ Solar and wind with battery storage are becoming cost-competitive. (Reuters $)
+ Here are three other breakthrough climate technologies. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Russia’s internet crackdown is hobbling small businesses
App restrictions and internet outages are causing headaches. (Reuters $)

8 Younger researchers are more likely to produce “disruptive” science
A new study found more experience led to fewer breakthroughs. (Nature)

9 Why Richard Dawkins was mistaken to believe Claude has feelings
But his line of inquiry wasn’t altogether foolish. (The Atlantic $)
+ Why it’ll be hard to tell if AI ever becomes conscious. (MIT Technology Review)

10 The Golden Globes have new AI rules (and they’re looser than the Oscars’)
AI is permitted as an enhancement, but not as a replacement. (Gizmodo)
+ Last week, the Oscars banned AI actors and writing. (NPR)

Quote of the day

“When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines. I treat them exactly as I would treat a very intelligent friend.” 

—Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins reflects on his interactions with advanced AI systems in an essay published in Unherd.

One More Thing

VIRGINIA HANUSIK


How to stop a state from sinking

In a 10-month span in 2020 and 2021, southwest Louisiana saw five climate-related disasters, including two destructive hurricanes and flash floods. But there could be a better way to protect the area: elevation.

The $6.8 billion Southwest Coastal Louisiana Project is betting that raising buildings while restoring coastal boundary lands that have long acted as natural barriers can preserve this slice of coastline. 

Here’s how officials hope to protect vulnerable communities by lifting homes out of the floodplain.

—Xander Peters

We can still have nice things

A place for comfort, fun, and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line.)

+ Soaking in a hot tub might offer even more health benefits than a sauna.
+ A court has officially protected America’s largest rainforest from future logging.
+ Experience the majesty of the world’s largest owl collection through these intimate, high-detail portraits.
+ A dad has turned his toddler’s random stories into high-production pop songs that are surprisingly catchy.

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Here’s how technology transformed babymaking

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Technology is changing the way we make babies. The pioneering work of the scientists who invented IVF led to the birth of the first “test tube baby” in 1978. We’ve come a long, long way since then.

This week, I’ve been working on a piece about the cutting edge of IVF technologies and what’s coming next. Think AI and robots and, potentially, gene-edited embryos.

My reporting has also made me think about just how much progress has been made in the last five decades. Clinicians have improved hormonal treatments. Embryologists have devised ways to culture embryos in the lab for longer. IVF clinics today offer multiple genetic tests for embryos.

In recent years, we’ve had reports of babies born with DNA from three people, babies born following “IVF on wheels,” babies born from decades-old embryos, and even babies “conceived” with the aid of a sperm-injecting robot.

The technology has also had a huge social impact. It has allowed for changes in the structure of families and provided more reproductive choices for would-be parents. So this week, let’s consider the technologies that have transformed babymaking.

Alan Penzias, a reproductive endocrinologist at Boston IVF, has been working in IVF since the early 1990s. In those days, his lab at Yale would collect a person’s eggs, fertilize them, and culture any resulting embryos for two days, until the embryos had two or four cells.

The embryos couldn’t survive any longer outside a body, so they’d be transferred to the uterus at that point. All of them. Even if there were, say, five embryos in total. Typical healthy patients could expect a live birth rate of 12% to 15%, he says.

Then Penzias heard that other teams were managing to culture embryos for three days. “We thought, No, that’s not possible,” he recalls. He learned that scientists had achieved this by tinkering with the culture medium—the nutrient-rich fluid the embryos are grown in.

Those three-day embryos, which had around six to 10 cells, seemed to have a better chance of resulting in a live birth. The teams culturing embryos for longer saw their success rates climb to 25% among similar patient groups, says Penzias. Again, he couldn’t believe it. “We thought they were making it up,” he says.

In the years since, teams have made more improvements to culture medium. Today, most IVF embryos are cultured for five or six days—a point at which they have 80 to 100 cells. The culturing process can act a little like a stress test—the embryos that make it to day six are generally more likely to go all the way and develop into a healthy baby.

Over the same period, advances in other technologies have opened up the options for what we can do with those embryos. Scientists learned they were able to freeze embryos and use them at a later date. A little over a decade ago, clinics shifted to a “vitrification” approach that rapidly cools the embryos to a glassy state. Vitrified embryos are more likely to survive freezing and thawing, so this approach quickly caught on.

As a result, doctors no longer needed to transfer multiple embryos at once. This made it less likely that patients would have twins or triplets, which can increase the risk of pregnancy complications.

Vitrification has also made IVF safer in other ways, including by affording patients a bit of time between fertility treatments. The hormonal treatments used in the first phase of IVF are designed to increase the production of mature eggs that can be collected. These treatments carry a small risk of a condition called ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), which in rare cases can be life-threatening. The ability to freeze all your embryos and use them at a later date is thought to give the body a chance to recover from hormonal treatment and reduces the risk of OHSS.

And because clinics are now able to culture embryos for up to a week, they can take a few of the 100 or so cells and send them for genetic testing before freezing the embryos. People undergoing IVF can get genetic readouts of all the embryos before deciding which to implant. (It is worth noting, however, that these testing technologies are not perfect.)

“Those are really radical changes, and we take them for granted,” says Penzias.

These technologies have also changed the function of IVF. What was once a treatment for infertility is now used to preserve fertility. People who want to delay parenthood can opt to freeze their eggs or embryos and use them later. They might opt to transfer one embryo in a year’s time and a second several years later. “We’ve been able to empower women to be able to have much more reproductive choice and get more reproductive mileage from a single IVF cycle,” says Penzias.

People who are about to undergo cancer treatments that might damage the testes or ovaries can opt to store their eggs or sperm ahead of time, too. Scientists have even been able to preserve pieces of ovarian and testicular tissue and reimplant them later, enabling recipients to have healthy babies.

Today, more people than ever have access to safe IVF options that offer multiple paths to parenthood. Those options look set to expand. But if you want to find out more about the AI and IVF robots, you’ll have to read this week’s story, here!

This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here.

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