Elon Musk lost his case against OpenAI and its top executives in a high-stakes trial that pitted billionaire against billionaires.
, in turn, accused Musk of trying to hobble the ChatGPT maker for the benefit of his own AI company. On Monday, the nine-person federal jury in Oakland, California, found that Musk waited too long to file his lawsuit and missed a statutory deadline.
After a three-week trial that included hundreds of pieces of evidence and some of tech's biggest names on the stand, the jury deliberated less than two hours before returning a verdict essentially on a technicality. Musk said he will appeal and called Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who oversaw the trial, a “terrible activist Oakland judge, who simply used the jury as a fig leaf" to create a bad precedent.
“She just handed out a free license to loot charities if you can keep the looting quiet for a few years! ” Musk wrote on his social media platform X.Gonzalez Rogers made it clear early on in the trial that she did not want it to become a debate over AI's dangers.
But the unresolved questions about the risks AI poses for job losses, mental health issues and even humanity’s extinction served as a backdrop for the proceedings, with protesters decrying both Musk and Altman becoming a regular presence outside the federal courthouse. Demonstrators' signs declared the real losers were regular people whose lives are being upended by an industry controlled by out-of-touch billionaires who can’t get along.
“This is a funny microcosm of this moment where we have this hugely important technology that’s being developed by for-profit corporations run by people like Musk and Altman and not as the part of some government-led initiative,” said Columbia Law School professor Dorothy Lund. The trial laid bare some of Silicon Valley's messy inner workings, with emails, diary entries and sometimes embarrassing text message exchanges shown as evidence.
Texts between Altman and a former OpenAI executive became meme fodder and the subject of parody songs.returned to his role a few days later. Several witnesses including two ex-board members, Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, said there were concerns about Altman’s truthfulness. Throughout the trial, OpenAI brushed off Musk’s allegations of betrayal as an unfounded case of sour grapes aimed at undercutting the company's rapid growth and bolstering Musk’s own artificial intelligence company, xAI, which is now part of SpaceX.
Both Musk's SpaceX and OpenAI are planning massive initial public offerings, as is Anthropic, which was formed by a group of seven ex-OpenAI leaders.
“It’s a lot of dirty laundry that doesn’t look very appealing, I suppose, and so that may hurt their reputation and may have downstream effects on all kinds of things that you can’t even anticipate,” said University of Richmond Law School professor Carl Tobias. “But you know, AI is likely to come forward and continue even if it isn’t OpenAI. ” Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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