Live updates from Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s court battle over the future of OpenAI – The Verge

Microsoft doesn’t want any of this

2026-05-13T12:29:27-04:00

Maybe I'm just punch-drunk in my third week attending Musk v. Altman, but I have become very, very fond of Microsoft during the course of this trial. They don't want to be here any more than I do.

Their opening statement was honestly one of the most Microsoft things I've ever seen. More than anything else, it was an ad for Microsoft that listed their products in some detail. The general implication, from that statement, was that this trial was absurd, their involvement was absurd, but you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, might still enjoy an Xbox game.

There's been a great deal of high drama on the stand, from Musk, his associates, and O …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Sam Altman was winning on the stand, but it might not be enough

2026-05-12T20:13:34-04:00

Who, me? | Image: The Verge; Getty Images

After two weeks of hearing from assorted witnesses that he was a lying snake, the jury finally heard from the lying snake himself: Sam Altman. At the end of the testimony, his lawyer William Savitt asked him how it felt to be accused of stealing a charity.

"We created, through a ton of hard work, this extremely large charity, and I agree you can't steal it," Altman said. "Mr. Musk did try to kill it, I guess. Twice."

Altman was fully in "nice kid from St. Louis" mode, and did a passable impression of a man who was bewildered at what was happening to him. When he stepped down from the stand holding a stack of evidence binders, he even look …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Sam Altman says Elon Musk’s mind games were damaging OpenAI

2026-05-12T14:07:26-04:00

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says Elon Musk did "huge damage" to the culture of the AI startup. During testimony as part of Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, Altman said Musk required OpenAI president Greg Brockman and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever to rank researchers by their accomplishments and "take a chainsaw through a bunch."

Altman conceded that this was the management style the Tesla CEO was known for, but that it was incompatible with his startup. "I don't think Mr. Musk understood how to run a good research lab," Altman testified when his lawyer, William Savitt, asked about the impact of Musk's departure from OpenAI on morale. "For a …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Sam Altman takes the stand in trial against Elon Musk

2026-05-12T12:05:20-04:00

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has begun his testimony against Elon Musk in a high-profile jury trial in a California federal courtroom.

Altman, alongside OpenAI president Greg Brockman, is a primary defendant in the trial brought by Musk. Altman, Brockman, and Musk were all part of the initial founding team at OpenAI, with Musk investing up to $38 million in the ChatGPT-maker's early days. But the relationship between Musk and other OpenAI founders eventually soured, and Musk stepped away from the company, later going on to found his own direct competitor, xAI. In recent years, Musk and Altman have traded barbs and made a slew of allegations agains …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Microsoft was worried OpenAI would run off to Amazon and ‘shit-talk’ Azure

2026-05-08T13:55:39-04:00

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott. | Image: Getty Images

When OpenAI was busy experimenting with AI-powered gaming bots, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were in the early days of forming an AI partnership. Court documents from the ongoing Musk v. Altman trial have provided a rare look at the communications between Microsoft's top executives about investing in OpenAI and fears the AI startup could "storm off to Amazon" and "shit-talk" Microsoft.

Just days after OpenAI showed a bot beating a Dota 2 professional in the summer of 2017, Altman responded to Nadella's congratulations email with a proposal for a much bigger partnership with OpenAI to fund its next phase of AI resear …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Mira Murati’s deposition pulled back the curtain on Sam Altman’s ouster

2026-05-08T13:54:13-04:00

The week leading up to Thanksgiving 2023 was the AI industry's biggest soap opera moment. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was abruptly ousted from his role at the ChatGPT maker. The explanation? That Altman was "not consistently candid in his communications with the board." Now, via witness testimony and trial exhibits in Musk v. Altman, the public is getting a concrete look behind the scenes of that dramatic weekend for the first time, much of it centered on former CTO Mira Murati.

It was a unique situation in that the roller coaster of a power play - which seemed to change every hour - took place, in many ways, publicly. The board's strikingly vagu …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Musk’s biggest loyalist became his biggest liability

2026-05-07T11:55:46-04:00

I sat down in the Musk v. Altman trial courtroom today, painfully aware that no one was going to ask Shivon Zilis the question on everyone's minds: Girl, what the fuck are you doing?

Zilis, who testified under oath that she is the mother of four of Musk's children, was… What's the best way to characterize this? A Musk adviser? She denies she was a "chief of staff" but says she worked for Musk's "entire AI portfolio: Tesla, Neuralink, and OpenAI" starting in 2017. The two met through OpenAI, and they had what she referred to as a "one off" before becoming "friends and colleagues." The "one off," she confirmed, was "romantic in nature."

Her …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Mira Murati tells the court that she couldn’t trust Sam Altman’s words

2026-05-07T14:51:49-04:00

Mira Murati, OpenAI's former CTO, has testified under oath that CEO Sam Altman lied to her about the safety standards for a new AI model. In a video deposition shown during the ongoing Musk v. Altman trial on Wednesday, Murati said Altman falsely stated that OpenAI's legal department determined a new AI model did not need to go through the company's deployment safety board. "As you understand it, was Mr. Altman telling the truth when he made that statement to you?" Murati was asked in the deposition. "No," Murati said.

Murati said that during her tenure at OpenAI, Altman made her work more difficult. Her criticism "is completely management …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Google’s AI architect lived rent-free in Elon Musk’s head

2026-05-05T16:34:15-04:00

About a week into the Musk v. Altman trial, we've heard from some of the most powerful people in tech - including OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Elon Musk's fixer Jared Birchall, and Musk himself. But one of the most prominent characters is hovering around the margins: Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind.

Hassabis is the architect of Google's in-house AI lab. He founded DeepMind as an independent startup in 2010 and sold it to Google four years later, reportedly for between $400-650 million. Since then, he's been at the helm of many of Google's largest AI research breakthroughs, like AlphaFold - and he's climbed the ladder from there, …

Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI’s president does ‘all the things,’ except answer a question

2026-05-05T20:40:47-04:00

When the bromance sours, we all end up in court. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

The strongest witness for Elon Musk's case against OpenAI so far has been Greg Brockman's journal. Brockman himself is running as a close second.

Brockman was called to the stand in a rather unusual way - he was cross-examined first, followed by a direct examination - and he had some serious high school debate club energy. There was a lot of "I wouldn't characterize it that way," "I wouldn't say it that way," and "That sounds like something I wrote. Can I see it in context?" When Musk's attorney, Steven Molo, read some of the evidence aloud, Brockman would pedantically correct him if he skipped a word, even if that word was "a" or "the." Wh …

Read the full story at The Verge.