The ongoing legal battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI intensified on Wednesday after Musk issued an AI doomsday warning at an Oakland, California court. During the hearing, Musk testified against the lethal dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) which, according to him, “could kill us all”.
Musk was presenting his argument in front of a nine-person jury against OpenAI’s decision to change its non-profit business model to ‘for profit’. He said that under Sam Altman’s leadership, OpenAI abandoned its founding mission of developing AI for the betterment of humans to chase big profits.
Musk, who was among the 11 founding members of OpenAI in 2015, had first initiated the lawsuit in 2024. In this case that started in the San Francisco Superior Court two years ago, Musk had alleged that Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman would be breaching OpenAI’s “founding agreement” if they decided to change the company’s open-source and non-profit structure.
Speaking to the jury on Wednesday, Musk reportedly said that, “It (AI) could make us more prosperous, but it could also kill us all. It’s like if you had a very smart child — at the end of the day when the child grows up, you can’t really control that child, but you can try to instill the right values. Honesty, integrity, caring about humanity —being good, essentially.”
Musk also said that he was pivotal in shaping up OpenAI in 2015 and could have created it as a commercial company if he wanted to.
The responses to Musk’s statements on social media was hued with satire with many pointing out how his own AI model Grok constantly keep coming into trouble for controversial responses.
According to OpenAI, however, its pivot to for-profit was strategic in terms of fuelling its financial strength to be able to fulfil the expensive requirements of computing power and top scientists as well as resources.
The AI firm has meanwhile argued that Musk’s motivation to legally come after the company stems from a compulsion to maintain control of the company which he officially exited in February 2018, reports said.
These comments on AI from Musk have come just months after he merged his AI company xAI with his space company, SpaceX. The merged entity is reportedly racing with OpenAI in the race to go public soon aiming at an ambitions trillion dollar valuation. This was also reportedly pointed out by OpenAI’s attorney before the jury.
As part of the lawsuit, Musk is seeking $150 billion in damages from OpenAI and its major investor, Microsoft.
In 2025, OpenAI underwent its corporate restructuring to become a for-profit entity. It is now a “public benefit corporation” (PBC) that is legally required to balance the interests of shareholders with a specific public benefit.