A closely watched legal battle in the global artificial intelligence (AI) sector has reached a preliminary outcome in a U.S. federal court in California.
Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk previously sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging that the company had deviated from its original nonprofit mission of “benefiting all humanity.” However, the jury unanimously found that Musk filed the lawsuit too late, exceeding the statute of limitations, and the judge subsequently dismissed the case.
The trial lasted three weeks. Musk accused OpenAI of violating charitable trust principles and claimed that its management had reaped enormous profits from the rapid growth of ChatGPT. He sought to have the court dismantle OpenAI’s current for-profit structure, restore its public-benefit model, and require the company to return more than US$130 billion in assets to its nonprofit arm.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Musk, Altman, and Greg Brockman, among others. It initially operated as a nonprofit research organization with the goal of advancing artificial intelligence in an open manner and preventing domination by large technology companies. Musk donated approximately US$38 million at the time. Later, due to the high cost of developing large AI models, OpenAI created a “capped-profit” structure in 2019, allowing external investment while retaining nonprofit board oversight.
The court noted that Musk was aware as early as 2017–2019 of OpenAI’s plans to move toward commercialization, including the creation of the capped-profit structure and acceptance of major investments, but only filed suit in 2024. As a result, the case was dismissed on procedural grounds due to expiration of the statutory limitation period. The court did not make a substantive ruling on whether OpenAI had deviated from its original mission.
OpenAI countered that Musk’s lawsuit was motivated by competition and personal grievances after he left the company. Musk stepped down from OpenAI’s board in 2018 and later founded his own AI company xAI, launching the chatbot Grok to compete with ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has made substantial investments in OpenAI in recent years, totaling around US$13–14 billion. Microsoft chairman Satya Nadella also testified in court, stating that the partnership with OpenAI could generate up to US$92 billion in returns.
OpenAI is reportedly now valued at over US$850 billion and is preparing for a major initial public offering (IPO).