After nearly two hours of deliberation, a jury in California’s District Court in Oakland has knocked back Elon Musk’s claims that OpenAI, under Sam Altman’s leadership, moved away from its public-benefit mission as it became a for-profit business, saying the CEO of Tesla waited to long to sue the tech company.
While the deliberation was advisory—meaning the jury is essentially giving a recommendation rather than a binding decision—the US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers agreed with the decision.
“I think there is a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury’s findings,” she said, after accepting the nine-member jury’s unanimous verdict.
The three-week trial pitted the high-profile Altman against estranged co-founder Musk.
During his time at OpenAI, Musk invested some US$38 million (AUD $53 million) and alleged that when the company pivoted from non-profit to for-profit, executives “stole a charity”.
As a result he wanted Altman removed from the board and the damages to be returned to OpenAI’s charitable arm.
“I was a fool,” Musk told the court earlier this month. “I gave them free funding to create a start-up.”
“The finding of the jury confirmed that what this lawsuit was is a hypocrite’s hypocritical attempt to sabotage a competitor and to overcome a long history of very bad predictions about what OpenAI has been and will become,” OpenAI attorney William Savitt told reporters, following the trial.
Musk said in 2014 that AI is “potentially more dangerous than nukes,” and when OpenAI was introduced in December 2015, Musk and other organisers ensured the reason for OpenAI was to develop technology that could help people and focus on safety.
But, when OpenAI completed its conversion to a for-profit entity, Musk claimed Altman had deceived him by accepting his money and then reneging on OpenAI’s original non-profit mission to develop artificial intelligence (AI) technology for the benefit of humanity.
As part of the completed arrangement in October of 2025, OpenAI and Microsoft announced changes to their partnership that left the tech giant with a 27 per cent stake in the ChatGPT-maker.
Since the tech company has gone for-profit, it has rolled out ads on its artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT.
In January, OpenAI introduced ads to ChatGPT on a test basis for certain adult users in the US. Then, in March advertising on the chatbot was introduced in Australia.
