On May 12, 2026, Sam Altman took the witness stand in a federal courthouse in Oakland, testifying in Elon Musk’s breach-of-foundering-agreement suit against OpenAI. The jury trial is in its third week, with closing arguments set for Thursday, May 14. Both sides have compressed the dispute into one question: was OpenAI’s pivot from nonprofit to for-profit a betrayal of its founding mission — in Musk’s framing, a scheme to “steal a charity”?
The stakes are enormous. Musk is asking the jury to remove Altman and Greg Brockman from their positions, redistribute $134 billion back to OpenAI’s nonprofit, and unwind the for-profit conversion. If granted, that relief would rewrite the legal foundations of OpenAI’s control, valuation, and governance — and send a shock through the ecosystem of products built on its APIs.
The Core Claim: “Stole a Charity”
Musk’s attorney Steven Molo keeps the storyline simple: Musk bankrolled the nonprofit OpenAI with quarterly donations, then watched it converted into a for-profit he would never control, in breach of the founding agreement. Brockman testified that before Musk walked out in 2018 he “stormed around the table,” and court filings cite a Musk text message threatening Brockman just days before the trial began.
OpenAI denies wrongdoing and dismisses the suit as jealousy-driven harassment. What makes this case unusual is that it is not a war of press releases — it is a fact question put to a jury: whether a founding agreement existed, whether the conversion betrayed it, and who has been telling the truth.
Altman’s Testimony and Cross-Examination
Altman’s direct testimony attacked the theft framing head-on: “We created, through a ton of hard work, this extremely large charity, and I agree you can’t steal it. Mr. Musk did try to kill it, I guess. Twice.” He added that after Musk stopped donating, OpenAI ran on an “extremely short runway of cash,” and that Musk did “huge damage for a long time to the culture of the organization.”
Control ran as the second theme. Altman told jurors about a 2017 email to Shivon Zilis: “I am worried about control. I don’t think any one person should have control of the world’s first AGI.” When he raised succession with Musk, the reply was that “maybe control should pass to my children” — which Altman described as hair-raising. Of Musk’s Tesla recruitment overtures, he said, “I read a vague, like, a lightweight threat in there.”
The cross-examination was a character trial. Steven Molo spent more than ten minutes cataloguing people who have called Altman a liar: Sutskever, Murati, Toner, McCauley, the Amodei brothers, colleagues from his Loopt days, a New Yorker profile, and the book The Optimist. The Verge’s courtroom read was blunt — “fairly shoddy lawyering from Musk’s side” — noting that the Stanford fundraising angle backfired, that the jury appeared to warm to Altman, and that his account was backed mostly by contemporaneous documents, unlike the testimony from Musk, Zilis, and Brockman.
Insider Testimony: A “Pattern of Lying”?
Musk’s strongest material came from OpenAI’s own alumni. Mira Murati, in a videotaped deposition, accused Altman of “creating chaos” and “saying one thing to one person and completely the opposite to another person.” Texts from 2023 shown in court had Altman asking whether his prospects were “directionally good or bad”; Murati replied, “Directionally very bad.” Ilya Sutskever testified in person, confirming he told the board that Altman “exhibits a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs and pitting his execs against one another.”
Former board member Helen Toner cited a “pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor,” while Natasha McCauley described “repeated crisis events” under his leadership. Even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that he never received a specific reason for the 2023 firing, called the board’s handling “sort of amateur city,” and feared employees would leave en masse.
Why This Trial Matters
First, this is a public referendum on the nonprofit-to-for-profit structure that much of the frontier-lab world has copied or considered. Anthropic, xAI, and every lab weighing hybrid governance now gets a jury’s verdict on how that conversion reads when litigated. Second, the $134 billion redistribution request, if credited, would force a restructuring of OpenAI’s capital and control — and for developers and product teams building on OpenAI APIs, the legal entity behind pricing, contracts, and enterprise agreements could shift underneath them. Third, timing amplifies everything: The Verge cites a WSJ report that Altman’s investments are drawing political scrutiny ahead of a prospective OpenAI IPO, so the reputational verdict may land long before the legal one. Governance and restructuring have been the running theme of the AI industry’s 2026 — this trial puts that theme under oath.
After closing arguments, the decision belongs to the jury. Whatever they decide, the question of who controls an AGI company has officially moved from boardrooms into a courtroom.
Sources
- Sam Altman was winning on the stand, but it might not be enough — The Verge
- ‘A consistent pattern of lying’: trial exposes what insiders think of Sam Altman — The Guardian
- Altman forced to confront claims at OpenAI trial that he’s a prolific liar — Ars Technica
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.