Elon Musk and Sam Altman will face each other in a California courtroom on Monday, as a closely watched $852 billion legal battle over the future direction of artificial intelligence begins in Oakland, centred on control of OpenAI and its flagship product, ChatGPT. The AI trial, overseen by US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, will probe Musk's allegation that Altman and OpenAI betrayed the non-profit mission he says they agreed on in 2015 and quietly turned the company into a for-profit juggernaut behind his back.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit research lab based in San Francisco, billed as a kind of counterweight to tech giants like Google and Facebook. Musk was a founding backer and early sponsor, channelling roughly $38 million into the project between December 2015 and May 2017.
