Could anything but profit steer AI? The OpenAI trial offered clues but
no verdict
[May 26, 2026] By
MATT O'BRIEN
The trial pitting Elon Musk against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made clear the
two billionaires agreed on one thing: building artificial intelligence
would require significant resources — and enormous amounts of money.
It may seem obvious now, as an AI-obsessed stock market helps finance a
global construction boom of chipmaking factories and energy-hogging data
centers to keep chatbots running, but testimony and evidence showed how
people with outsized control of the AI industry were privately debating
its costs nearly a decade ago.
“Even raising several hundred million won’t be enough,” Musk said in a
2018 email to Altman and other OpenAI co-founders about what he
increasingly saw as a futile attempt to compete with Google. “This needs
billions per year immediately or forget it.”
The soaring costs factored into the trajectory of OpenAI, which began in
2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the common good and
is now a capitalistic enterprise valued at $852 billion. As San
Francisco-based OpenAI and other AI companies move toward historically
large Wall Street debuts, the trial also raised questions about whether
anything but commercial interests can steer AI’s future.
It is possible to build big things only with nonprofit money, but in the
case of OpenAI's early years, the uncertainty around AI also made it a
risky investment, said Karan Girotra, a professor of operations,
technology, and innovation at Cornell Tech. Now, he said, investment in
AI is no longer speculative.
“Now it’s traditional investment in something we know works,” Girotra
said. “People want your car, you need to build the factory ahead of
demand.”
In his lawsuit, Musk accused OpenAI of betraying its charitable mission
for building AI, saying Altman and fellow co-founder Greg Brockman went
behind his back and unjustly enriched themselves. OpenAI, in turn, has
said Musk supported plans to form a for-profit company and filed his
2024 lawsuit to undercut the ChatGPT maker's success as he built his own
AI company, xAI.
The jury did not touch questions about AI's future
The federal jury in Oakland, California, never got to deliver a verdict
on the merits of the case, determining Musk's lawsuit missed a statutory
deadline and dismissing it Monday after a three-week trial.
But the trial put on record details of internal battles that presaged
today’s societal and political debates over AI’s impacts and costs.
“It’s sort of hard to imagine at this point, given where AI has gotten,”
testified Kevin Scott, Microsoft's chief technology officer, as he
explained to jurors why his company opted to invest billions of dollars
to help build OpenAI's technology after founding donor Musk quit
OpenAI's board in 2018.
“It was before ChatGPT," Scott said. "It was before these remarkable
things that are happening right now and so most of the people at
Microsoft were very skeptical about whether or not all of these claims
were going to materialize into reality.”
Microsoft, a defendant in the lawsuit, at the time was also looking for
a way to compete with Google in AI research. OpenAI told Microsoft what
they needed was more data and more computing resources — and if they had
that, their AI systems would grow far more powerful.
[to top of second column] |
Bill Savitt, an attorney for OpenAI, speaks to the media after a
jury ruled in the company's favor in a a federal trial in Oakland,
Calif. on Monday, May 18, 2026. (AP Photo/Terry Chea)
 “The things that they wanted and
ultimately that we helped them do were very capital-intensive
projects like building giant data centers, full of very expensive
computers and networks,” Scott said.
Testimony detailed how costs limited options
It remains in dispute how much profit was the prime motivator for
the shift to OpenAI’s capitalistic enterprise, which is not yet
profitable but likely headed for an initial public offering as soon
as later this year.
What is clear, however, is how the costs involved constrained the
company's options.
More than five years before OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, the company
had a breakthrough when it taught an AI system to beat professional
players of Dota 2, a multiplayer video game featuring ogres,
centaurs and other fantastical creatures.
“Honestly, the world reacted to it somewhat less than I thought they
should have, but to us internally, it really felt like a moment
where we had shown that our technology, using something called
reinforcement learning, could take on an enormously complex task,"
Altman testified.
OpenAI's livestreamed victory against a top Dota 2 player at a
Seattle competition in 2017 made the tiny nonprofit a major
contender against Google, which was then seen as the leader in AI
research. It also led to some soul-searching about how OpenAI could
compete when it was a nonprofit, largely dependent on Musk and other
donors.
“He was impressed,” Altman said of Musk. “And then immediately after
the Dota win, Mr. Musk said he thought we really need to get more
serious and figure out how to get way more capital.”
For another co-founder and OpenAI's former chief scientist, Ilya
Sutskever, the Dota victory was the beginning of discussion about
whether OpenAI should create a for-profit company to more easily
raise money.
“The realization is that to make progress in AI, you need a big
computer," Sutskever told jurors. "And you need the big computer
because the brain is a big computer. You have a hundred billion
neurons and a hundred trillion synapses in the brain.”
What followed was a battle of wills — with Altman and Musk vying for
leadership of OpenAI and Musk later trying to fold the AI laboratory
into his car company Tesla. The other OpenAI leaders resisted, and
Musk eventually quit.
___
AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay contributed to this story.
All contents © copyright 2026 Associated Press. All rights reserved |
