The messy courtroom drama over AI’s biggest breakup

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.OAKLAND, Calif.—U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers opened the last day of testimony in the titanic trial between Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s OpenAI with a simple question: Should a trophy of a golden donkey’s backside be entered into evidence?The judge held the statue in her hands with a bemused look.

Dario Amodei, then a team lead for AI safety, had helped award it to a company intern years earlier, after Musk called the person a “jackass” for challenging him over AI safety at a company meeting.“We think it’s pretty obvious this trophy has no relevance,” a lawyer for Musk said in court. Gonzalez Rogers opted to allow a photo of the statue given to Joshua Achiam, now OpenAI’s chief futurist, to be admitted.The actual statue was put away before the jury of six women and three men could see it, although they were shown a photo.

So went the landmark legal showdown between some of the most powerful players in AI. The three-week trial, now in the jury’s hands, was technically about allegations by Musk, the world’s richest man, that he was snookered into fronting OpenAI millions of dollars as a struggling nonprofit, only to see it morph into the world’s most powerful AI company.

OpenAI argued it had to go commercial to fund its massive research needs, and that Musk supported such a move.The proceedings revealed the mythmaking of AI’s seismic economic transformation, with heady talk of benefiting humanity and existential risk. It also exposed the AI boom’s underbelly: the grubby sidedeals, financial anxieties, short tempers and personal vendettas that have shaped modern technology every bit as much as the march toward machine consciousness.Two days before the trial, Musk emailed OpenAI