OpenAI Is Getting Sued by Elon Musk While Suing Apple. Busy Week.
On Monday, a federal jury in Oakland will begin deliberating in the case of Elon Musk versus Sam Altman and OpenAI. The stakes: a $150 billion damages claim, a potential court order dismantling OpenAI's for-profit structure, and the removal of Altman and Brockman from the company Musk co-founded and Altman built into the most important AI company on earth.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has quietly retained outside legal counsel to explore whether to sue Apple.
The company Musk is suing for betraying its nonprofit mission is simultaneously preparing to sue a different company for betraying its distribution promises. Everyone is mad. Everyone has lawyers. The people who were going to prevent an AI apocalypse are apparently now keeping their legal department very busy.
You really can't make this up.
What Musk actually wants
The short version of the Musk trial is this: Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman and others in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab. Musk donated and helped recruit talent. Then he left the board in 2018. OpenAI subsequently created a for-profit "capped profit" structure and raised billions at a valuation now north of $500 billion, on track toward a trillion-dollar IPO.
Musk says he was promised it would stay a nonprofit. He says his donations were made under that condition. He also testified during the first week that xAI — his rival AI company — has been distilling OpenAI's models, which is an interesting thing to admit from the witness stand while you're suing someone for breaching a nonprofit mandate.
Altman's testimony included the detail that Musk wanted 90 percent of the company. Musk's camp denies this framing. The jury will now decide who to believe, which is a slightly surreal situation given that the answer might reshape how the United States competes with China in artificial intelligence. No pressure.
The Apple situation is a completely different kind of betrayal
At WWDC 2024, Apple announced that ChatGPT would be integrated into Siri and Apple's Visual Intelligence feature. This was a big deal. Every iPhone user in the world would now have access to ChatGPT baked into their phone. OpenAI was finally getting the distribution it couldn't build on its own.
An OpenAI executive told the company to "take a leap of faith and trust us." They trusted them.
It did not work out well.
The ChatGPT integration is, in the words of people inside OpenAI, "buried" and "hard to find." The revenue that was supposed to flow from all that distribution is "nowhere close to projections." Apple, which has its own Apple Intelligence product and considerable interest in not making its Siri successor look like it needs a third-party crutch, apparently did not feel a strong institutional motivation to make the ChatGPT integration easy to discover.
Now OpenAI has outside counsel looking at the contract. A formal breach-of-contract notice may be coming, probably after the Musk trial concludes so the company can focus on one existential legal battle at a time.
What this is actually about
The Musk suit and the Apple situation are not the same kind of problem. Musk's case is about whether the world's most powerful AI company was built on a promise it didn't keep. Apple's case is about whether a distribution partnership was structured in a way that favored one party's interests over the other's. Both situations, though, tell you something real about where OpenAI is in 2026.
OpenAI is no longer a scrappy research lab. It's not even quite a startup. It's an entity so central to the modern technology landscape that Elon Musk thinks it's worth going to federal court to blow up, and Apple thinks it's worth using as a feature to bury rather than a partner to promote. When you're important enough to weaponize and important enough to litigate, you've made it. Congratulations, I guess.
There's an old line about how you can tell a lot about someone by who their enemies are. OpenAI's enemies this week are Elon Musk and Apple. That's not a bad enemy list if you're measuring importance. It's a terrible enemy list if you're trying to ship products and hit IPO targets without the whole structure collapsing around you.
The jury deliberates Monday. The Apple lawyers are apparently warming up. And somewhere in all of this, the actual AI is still getting built. Probably.
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