Elon Musk wins key legal battle as judge allows jury trial in OpenAI lawsuit

New Delhi: Elon Musk has won the first case in his legal battle against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, with a US judge saying that several of the claims in the lawsuit must be resolved by a jury. The suit focuses on the claims that OpenAI has forsaken its initial mission as a nonprofit organisation and changed to a profit-making venture.

During a hearing in Oakland, California, US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers declared that there was sufficient evidence in question to proceed to trial instead of dismissing it out of the case. The ruling leaves alive Musk's claims and prepares a hotly anticipated jury trial in March, as competition in the generative AI market continues to grow.

According to Judge Gonzalez Rogers, there was ‘plenty of evidence’ that the leadership of OpenAI had promised to operate following a nonprofit form. Since such promises are now being challenged, she determined that the decision that OpenAI broke its original promises should be made not by the court itself but by a jury. The judge indicated that she would make a written ruling concerning the case thrown out by OpenAI, reported by New York Post.

According to the lawyers of OpenAI, Musk had not provided a factual basis that was adequate enough to continue with the case, and his claims were filed late. According to the judge, the jury would be posed with the question of whether the lawsuit qualified as out of the statute of limitations.

In 2018, Musk, the co-founder of OpenAI, is alleged to have donated approximately 60 per cent of its start-up capital, around $38 million, to the organisation, yet he had left the company prior to its inception. He says that it was supported with the expectation that OpenAI would be a nonprofit aimed at the good of the people. The lawsuit alleges to have worked out an engineer towards a for-profit business model to make Sam Altman and Greg Brockman wealthy, ultimately leading to multibillion-dollar deals, such as with Microsoft.

OpenAI, Altman and Brockman have denied the allegations. They have referred to Musk as a business competitor trying to act as an obstacle to a mission-orientated competitor. Microsoft, which is also a defendant, has requested the court to drop the claims against it, claiming that it has no evidence that it assisted or supported any form of wrongdoing.

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The case takes place in an environment of intense competition in artificial intelligence. Musk is currently the founder of xAI, whose chatbot Grok competes directly with ChatGPT of OpenAI. Musk is suing for, though he does not specify, monetary damages, which he defines as recovery of ill-gotten gains.

OpenAI did not comment on the hearing immediately, and neither did xAI. Providing it goes to trial, the jury decision might have far-reaching consequences on the way AI businesses strike a balance between nonprofit sources, business alliances and profit maximisation.