xAI

What happened in the second week of Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman? The Verge senior AI reporter, Hayden Field, can help you catch up.

Following its acquisition by Elon’s other company, xAI is now being referred to as SpaceXAI. Presumably this is only the start of the brand synergy to come.

In Wednesday’s annoucement of its compute partnership with Anthropic, the company formerly known as xAI referred to itself as “SpaceXAI.” It was the first time I had seen that name, and while I don’t think it’s a good one, it made some sense following SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI.

Brockman said that focusing on the game was his idea, in a project worked on by several people, later explaining that DeepMind was working on something similar with a different game but “had nothing” yet, contributing to their decision not to open-source the technology.

Just before they left, Jared Birchall’s testimony regarding the funding of the bid to buy OpenAI — the subject of last week’s drama — was struck.

In Brockman’s telling, Altman was around a lot more often than Musk. The gee-whiz energy here is off the charts, including a pre-launch story about the group being stuck in traffic for an hour and a half and not noticing because they were having such a good time.

From Sutskever’s texts to Brockman:

When Brockman was leaving Stripe, he told Altman “I’m thinking about doing an AI thing” and Altman said, “I’m also thinking about doing an AI thing” and “then we kept in touch.” They went to a dinner in Menlo Park — Musk arrived an hour late — to talk about AGI, then Brockman caught a ride home with Altman.

Asked what he does as president of OpenAI, that’s how Brockman responded. God I hate hearing millennial slang in the courtroom. Sooo I did a thing… for $30 billion.

“We very much have these AI models that are smart and capable but they’re not fully connected to the world,” Brockman says. “We as society are still figuring out how do we integrate these.” This is lol and also lmao.

When Musk left OpenAI he told Brockman that he was going to start an AGI competitor within Tesla. “The most important thing was that there was going to be a counterweight to Google/Deepmind,” Brockman said. Musk said there was “no hope — zero percent chance” at OpenAI. Musk also told Brockman that the work on AGI at Tesla would be secret because “the shareholders wouldn’t like it.”

Curious to see what they can recover from this testimony.

Look, correcting lawyers on whether they’ve dropped an article and saying things like “all those words are accurate so far” probably plays in a lot of places but this nitpicking doesn’t really cover you in glory in a courtroom. I get it! I am also obnoxious! But this kind of quibbling doesn’t help Brockman recover from the journal entries that make him look unreliable.

Cerebras, Stripe, CoreWeave, and Helion all appear on his financial disclosures. All four have deals with OpenAI. I see where this is going — probably a preview of what to expect with Altman.

It happened. Kind of a nothingburger, as Brockman said that the deal was “not really my focus area.” We are now back in his disclosures. OpenAI did a December 2025 deal with Cerebras, for $10 billion of chips — and Brockman had an investment. The deal increased Cerebras’ valuation to $23 billion. “Your equity in Cerebras became more valuable because of the transaction OpenAI did?” Brockman admits that’s possible.

But Brockman is back on the stand, and boy, morning has not been good to him. We are now moving on to Microsoft.

You may recall from Musk’s testimony that OpenAI has used purple boxes to highlight things. We see another purple box in OpenAI LLC’s announcement it exists. Molo asks if this is something OpenAI generally uses in its paperwork to highlight important things. Brockman says no. We go back and forth on this for a while, because Brockman thinks Molo’s statement is overly broad.

Brockman is worth $30 billion. Molo has been asking, over and over, why Brockman hasn’t donated the $29 billion to OpenAI’s charity since he’d be good at $1 billion. Brockman has been making weird non-answers. He sounds nervous and not especially convincing.

The famous Brockman quote has finally hit. Molo is arguing that rather than figuring out funding for the nonprofit, Brockman was plotting to get rich. Brockman is trying to say that there’s more context. While Molo is getting worked up, Brockman is pretty level. “Do we accept Elon’s terms, or do we reject the terms, he quits to create his own [AI company], and then we create our own [AI company]?” Molo tried to strike the answer, but he is overruled.

Greg Brockman’s journal really is making Greg Brockman look unreliable. Six days after telling Musk that Brockman et al. wanted more results in the nonprofit and to fundraise there, he writes, “We’ve been thinking about that maybe we should just flip to a for-profit. making money for us sounds great and all.” Brockman says this was an expression of a frustration and not a plan. Molo asks if he rehearsed that. Brockman says “no.”

He also writes, “To convert to a b-corp without him. That’d be pretty morally bankrupt.” That’s probably the most solid thing the Musk team has gotten out during the trial so far.

Molo asks if the nonprofit should still be a philanthropic endeavor. Brockman says, forcefully, “no.” We then look at notes from his diary, where he records Musk as saying “gotta figure out how do we transition from non-profit or something which is essentially philanthropic endeavor and is b-corp or c-corp.” Does make Brockman look pretty shifty.

We are hearing a lot of “I wouldn’t characterize it that way,” “I’m not sure I’d say it that way,” and “This sounds like something that I wrote, is it okay if we see it in context?” It’s not as contentious or tense as Musk’s exchanges with Savitt, but it’s definitely notable.

The question is whether Brockman disclosed his ownership of Cerebras when OpenAI was discussing merging with it. Brockman told Teller and Zilis, who were in theory Musk’s chiefs of staff, but not Musk himself. Molo is driving this home, which… I am less convinced by. Lots of executives delegate.

Musk’s team is finally landing some serious blows — namely that part of Brockman’s compensation was a grant from Altman’s family office. Musk’s adviser Jared Birchall wrote, “Greg is going to have a greater allegiance toward Sam as a result of this arrangement.” Brockman told Musk that “We ran out of YC stock fulfilling others’ offers” so Altman arranged the deal.

At a dinner about AI that Brockman and Altman attended, Musk was late. The first thing Brockman remembers Musk asking is, “Is Demis Hassabis evil?” Hassabis, of course, ran DeepMind.

It was initially supposed to be part of Y Combinator, as a research arm. Looking at a solicitation email from Brockman to then-CEO of Yahoo Marissa Mayer, Brockman writes that donors include Elon Musk, Jessica Livingston, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel. “I’m personally donating $100,000,” he writes. But he didn’t end up donating that. Brockman is speaking very quickly and very softly, and YGR has just scolded him for it.

Brockman is taking the stand next.

I still don’t really understand how this expert helps Musk’s case, if at all.

We are now going through previous statements that Russell has made about Musk — for instance, Russell says that the “age of abundance” Musk talks about with AI robots will be great for Musk because of his pay package with Tesla. Also that Russell would not recommend that Musk be an AI adviser for President Trump.

The expert has testified in front of the US Senate about the dangers of open-sourcing AI systems. “If we open-source AI systems that are unsafe, we dramatically increase the risks,” Russell says. One of Musk’s contentions is that OpenAI is betraying its mission by not open-sourcing its models. Russell is now saying, in response to cross-examination, that open-sourcing can make it easier to remove safety guardrails that have been put in place. “It requires additional and very stringent safety measures.”

I really have no idea what it adds to Musk’s case. It seems to just be a way of running out the clock — but why bother? Is it just a way of giving OpenAI less time to defend themselves?

It’s very boring. Mainly we are establishing that the expert witness provided no specific opinions on OpenAI’s safety.

Because otherwise, this would be the guy to ask about the nonconsensual undressing and MechaHitler. We are getting slowly to the point, I think — which is that Russell suggests safety concerns would slow AI development. “Each company individually feels it needs to be in this race,” he says. “That means they can’t stop and solve the safety problem, which I think some of their employees would like to do, but the overall company police is preventing them.”

His name is Stuart Russell, and he’s getting $4,000/hr for his first 40 hours of working with the team (and $1,500/hr after that). Seems like an expensive way for Musk’s lawyers to run out the clock… Because while we are getting some testimony about AI risks, I don’t really understand how this is relevant to the dispute at hand.

We’re going through motions before the jury arrives. The motion I highlighted earlier this morning has been denied; YGR says the time to bring in the threats from Musk was when Musk was on the stand.