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Sam Altman Had a Bad Day In Court (businessinsider.com) 56

Posted by BeauHD from the day-eight dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: As the trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI ended its second week, the Tesla CEO started scoring points against Sam Altman. His witnesses landed three solid punches in testimony about how Altman runs OpenAI as CEO, raising concerns about his dedication to AI safety, the nonprofit's mission, and his honesty as a leader of the organization. [...] This week, Musk's legal team called a parade of witnesses who questioned whether Altman was acting in the interest of the nonprofit. On Thursday, that included a former OpenAI safety researcher, who described a slow erosion of the company's safety teams, which prompted her to leave the company. Witnesses also shared stories about the company launching products without the proper safety reviews -- or the knowledge of the board. Rosie Campbell, a former AI safety researcher at OpenAI, testified that the company became more product-focused during her time there and moved away from the long-term safety work that had initially drawn her in. She said both long-term AI safety teams were eventually eliminated, and that she supported Altman's reinstatement only because she feared OpenAI might otherwise collapse into Microsoft: "It was my understanding at the time that the best way for OpenAI to not disintegrate and fall about would be for Sam to return." Still, Campbell's testimony wasn't entirely favorable to Musk. She also said xAI, Musk's AI company, likely had an inferior approach to safety than OpenAI.

Helen Toner, another former OpenAI board member, also testified about the board's concerns leading up to Altman's removal. She said the board was not primarily worried about ChatGPT's safety, but about Altman's leadership and investor relationships, saying, "The issues that we were concerned about in our decision to fire Sam were exacerbated by relationships with investors." Toner also described concerns that Altman was misrepresenting what others had said, telling the court, "We were concerned that Sam was inserting words into other people's mouths in order to get people to do what he wanted."

Meanwhile, Tasha McCauley, a former OpenAI board member, described a deep loss of trust in Altman and accused him of creating "chaos" and "crisis" inside the company. She said Altman fostered a "culture of lying and culture of deceit," including allegedly misleading others about whether GPT-4 Turbo needed internal safety review before launch.

Musk's lawyers then called to the stand David Schizer, a Columbia Law professor and nonprofit-governance expert, who framed Altman's alleged behavior as a serious governance problem for an organization that was supposed to be mission-driven. Asked about claims that products were launched without full board awareness or safety review, he said, "The board and CEO need to be partnering, working together, to make sure the mission is being followed," adding that "if the CEO is withholding that information, it's a big problem."

The day ended with the start of a Microsoft executive's deposition. Microsoft VP Michael Wetter said Azure had integrated OpenAI technology, that Microsoft saw strategic value in having AI developers build on Azure, and that a 2016 agreement allowed OpenAI to use Microsoft tools for free even though it could mean a loss of up to $15 million for Microsoft. Testimony ended early, with no court on Friday and the trial set to resume Monday.

Recap:
Sam Altman's Management Style Comes Under the Microscope At OpenAI Trial (Day Seven)
Brockman Rebuts Musk's Take On Startup's History, Recounts Secret Work For Tesla (Day Six)
OpenAI President Discloses His Stake In the Company Is Worth $30 Billion (Day Five)
Musk Concludes Testimony At OpenAI Trial (Day Four)
Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three)
Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two)
Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One)

Sam Altman Had a Bad Day In Court More | Reply

Sam Altman Had a Bad Day In Court

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  • relevance? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Friday May 08, 2026 @12:02AM (#66133540)
    While that indeed paints Altman in a bad light, I don't see how it is relevant to the actual court case here apart from trying to paint him as a bad person (which obviously both he and musk are)

    • Re:relevance? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by thecombatwombat ( 571826 ) on Friday May 08, 2026 @12:32AM (#66133558)

      I think it actually makes perfect sense.

      The whole thing hinges on taking money from Musk claiming to do one thing, and then doing another.

      The point is that he was never operating like a nonprofit, but took lots of money to do so. It does sound like a series of wins there, yeah.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by SpinyNorman ( 33776 )

        If Musk wanted to give free AI to the world (he'd probably use the word "humanity" or "human species") then he could be doing that right now with X.ai/Grok. but instead he's renting out his formerly X.ai datacenter to Anthropic for them to use instead (presumably because we wants to try to harm OpenAI).

        Musk never seemed committed to OpenAI as a humanity-saving charity back in the day - he just wanted to be the boss of it, and withdrew in a huff when the others wouldn't let him. As I recall, didn't he both w

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          Of the two, I distrust Altman less than I distrust Musk. OTOH, I *think* Musk has become less competent than Altman. Not that that's really relevant to the case. The ideal result would be Musk being put in jail for contempt of court...and held there until he managed to make an honest statement of the case. And for OpenAI to be turned into a non-profit.

          It was NEVER a piece of open software. The name itself was a lie. And that tells you all you need to know about those controlling it.

          • Of course it's not relevant to the lawsuit, other than all the dirty laundry that is being aired, but I'd certainly trust Musk more than Altman.

            Altman is a pathological liar and as multiple board members and executives are testifying will just make stuff up about who said what to try to manipulate people. I would basically assume that everything that Altman says is said to try to manipulate, with zero regard for whether it's true or not. He is one of those people (Trump is another) for who "truth" is just n

      • I think it actually makes perfect sense.

        The whole thing hinges on taking money from Musk claiming to do one thing, and then doing another.

        The point is that he was never operating like a nonprofit, but took lots of money to do so. It does sound like a series of wins there, yeah.

        The OpenAI non-profit is alive and well and focused on the same hippy trippy dumbass research mission it has always been, the development of AGI and ensuring it benefits all humanity not an elite few. Whether Musk actually took that seriously or not is as irrelevant as his thoughts on colonizing Mars - THAT is the crazy he stuck his dick in, and that's what you need to hold him to account for. Whatever, it's his money, nobody took it from him.

        If you don't like OpenAI paying for operations by selling subscri

    • I don't see how it is relevant to the actual court case here

      Many court cases brought on by billionaires aren't initiated with the intention of winning the case. They're platforms that allow the parties to gather as much dirt on the other as they can during the discovery phase and then air out all of their opponent's dirty laundry during the testimony portion of trial. In addition to that, they get to drain financial resources from their opponent, distract from their day-to-day leadership responsibilities

  • Telling everyone what they want to hear, burning through his VC tokens like no other startup CEO.
    Trying to ride out the wave like Zuck with enough motivated employees to clean up the mess after him.

  • for us to just forget him.

  • Altman vs Musk (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Friday May 08, 2026 @12:21AM (#66133554)

    Neither is a particularly endearing character, but of the 2, Altman gives me more of the "serial killer who'd poison your entire family to get what he wants, turn your back and he'll take your wallet" type of evil, and Musk more the "we're going to leave everyone on earth to die, want to have my child?" kind of evil. I'm not sure which is worse ... but in this case, Musk clearly has a better argument against OpenAI than OpenAI has in its defense - merely from the 'nonprofit to profit' basis, ignoring the intent and other aspects about safety.... which is certainly concerning in its own right.

    OT, but... the way these big shops seem to be doing 'safety' is an idiotic bolt-on approach, from what I can see: it's all after-the-fact. If you give your agent/model a foundational prompt like "You're a helpful bot", that colors everything it does after that. They need to have a moral/foundations layer which does the same thing, perhaps even trained on its own very insular dataset that's been curated to meet objectives that can help it rank the value of different data. That way Reddit or some postgrad's humanities paperwork doesn't get the same criterial evaluation as, say, Socrates, Einstein, or the Bible. Maybe they do that - but it certainly doesn't seem like it, based on how easy it is to get them to disobey "safety" guidelines.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dunkelfalke ( 91624 )

      I personally think that Musk is worse. Altman is a pretty much run-off-the-mill CEO, no different from thousands of others. Musk, however, has delusions of grandeur, an urge to change the world, and a worldview that is severely skewed due to slippage of sanity. The worst kind of nutcases are those who think that it is the world that is crazy and needs fixing, not them, and actually have the means to follow up on it.

      • Altman is only just getting started , he reminds me of Theil and Zuckerberg, they are not wired right and rarely seem happy or laughing. They appear to only have one mission, profit on societal decline, they are not making the world a better place.

        Musk for all his oddness and outrage appears to have done more for channelling capital into our technical evolution, and that might make the world a better place. He might be our Howard Hughes. He also appears to live relatively humbly and gets his hands dirty wit

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by dunkelfalke ( 91624 )

          Thiel is, like Musk, someone who wants to change the world for the worse because he thinks he knows better. Altman simply wants wealth.

        • > He also appears to live relatively humbly

          So should we regard Hitler any better if we knew he drove a Volkswagon (not that he did afaik), or had humanizing qualities like enjoying painting (true)?

          I'm not saying Musk is Hitler, although he does appear to have white supremancy leanings, just that what does living humble have to do with merit? Didn't the Unabomber live humbly in a hut in the woods?

          As far as Musk's humble living, he apparently just made waves in Miami by helicoptering in to view a $300M wat

          • although he does appear to have white supremancy leanings

            Don't think he's a white supremacist but someone who likes Western culture and is "pro-west". So am I. It so happens that most Western culture was created by white folks because for most of modern history, the West was coincidentally full of white folks. However, if he was a white supremacist he wouldn't want to flood the US with brown folks from India and he definitely does want that.

      • I personally think that Musk is worse. Altman is a pretty much run-off-the-mill CEO, no different from thousands of others. Musk, however, has delusions of grandeur, an urge to change the world, and a worldview that is severely skewed due to slippage of sanity. The worst kind of nutcases are those who think that it is the world that is crazy and needs fixing, not them, and actually have the means to follow up on it.

        Actually, if you've ever read or heard an Altman interview, he has all the ingredients in place to match Musk given time when it comes to the delusions of grandeur. He either fervently believes his tech ambitions are absolutely essential to maintaining human existence, or he does a fantastic job of projecting that he believes it. And while long-term acquaintances (I don't know if he has actual friends) have said of Musk that he wants humanity to be saved, but only if he can be the one to save it, Altman is

      • Looks like Altman did steal a non-profit he saw dollar signs on. I don't care if the liberal idiots on the news hate Musk. They aren't finished having a freak out over his relationship to Trump and DOGE drop-kicking USAID to the curb (good riddance! MOAR!). The only problem I have is that DOGE didn't do NEARLY ENOUGH and Trump 180'ed on almost all his campaign promises (didn't cut government even close to significantly enough, ran off DOGE, didn't stop Ukraine boondoggle, didn't stop Gaza boondoggle, and st

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

        His own sister has made rape and sexual assault accusations against Altman, which supposedly went on for decades. He's "questionable" at best with regard to the murder of one of his prior coworkers/employees who was going to blow the whistle. I'm not sure what Musk has done comparable.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Required Snark ( 1702878 )
      Is there any way they can both loose?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      If you really want safety you don't train your AI on the internet. Internet chat is where people say what they feel like without worrying about repercussions. That's not a good source of training data...except for learning not to trust what people say.

    • Models (Score:2)

      by JBMcB ( 73720 )

      They need to have a moral/foundations layer which does the same thing, perhaps even trained on its own very insular dataset that's been curated to meet objectives that can help it rank the value of different data.

      It's all statistical connections between words. It's not a conceptual model. There is no understanding of morality, ethics, or basic reason or logic. The only way to fix it is to bolt stuff on after training.

      Also, you need an enormous dataset to get enough useful weighting for the model to work. For example, they didn't use chat logs because they wanted to, but because they needed the training data to get the models to function. They are still looking for more. You could prune back sources, but the mod

  • First, Business Insider is a pay-to-play game. If you have a few dollars, they'll publish whatever you want published.

    Second, this "anonymous reader" providing this story to publish here wouldn't happen to be working for ... um ... Elon Musk?!? FFS, that douchebag is so transparent.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      You're too cynical. Plenty of Slashdot readers are fans of Musk, and Slashdot it small enough these days that I doubt Musk would bother.

  • If you're going to sell a thing and use the proceeds for a different thing, a public benefit company owned by a non-profit company that invests in the PBC is a pretty normal structure.

    If engineers didn't automatically dismiss business administration as a trivial pursuit, their MBAs could gave gotten them to the final structure a lot sooner.

    The structure of OpenAI isn't the problem here; it's bad corporate governance.

  • I don't know who to root against more here. Can they both lose? Is that an option?

  • Challenge for the legal system (Score:5, Funny)

    by david.emery ( 127135 ) on Friday May 08, 2026 @09:26AM (#66133878)

    How do we find both Musk and Altman guilty, and sentence them to life in prison?

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