Sam Altman, Satya Nadella on the stand — and OpenAI’s internal fights just spilled into the open. Welcome to Musk v Altman Daily. And yeah, today the courtroom basically turned into a live deposition of the entire AI industry. We’ve got Ilya Sutskever saying he spent a year building a paper trail against Altman, and Satya Nadella in defense of the Microsoft deal — two very different pictures of who OpenAI actually answers to. A co-founder keeping a dishonesty dossier on his own CEO? That’s not a tech company, that’s prestige television. This one's from The Indian Express:
Former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever testified on Monday that he spent about a year gathering evidence for the ChatGPT maker’s board that CEO Sam Altman had displayed a “consistent pattern of lying.”
During his testimony in a legal fight between OpenAI and Elon Musk, the top AI researcher confirmed he had been thinking about taking action to remove Altman as CEO for at least one year prior to his November 2023 board vote to oust Altman.
Week three of the Musk v. Altman trial, and The Indian Express is leading with the big one: Ilya Sutskever on the stand, saying he spent a full year quietly building a dossier on Sam Altman before that November 2023 board vote to remove him. A year. He was collecting receipts for a year. That’s not a snap call — that’s months and months of, "something is seriously off here." And legally, that matters. If Sutskever can show the board acted on documented, good-faith concerns about Altman’s honesty — not just a palace coup — that goes straight to whether the ouster was a legitimate fiduciary move or something Musk can point to as proof the place was falling apart. And meanwhile Altman gets reinstated, raises billions, and keeps marching toward a trillion-dollar IPO. So whatever side “won” that board fight, it definitely wasn’t Sutskever. People Matters writes:
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took the witness stand in federal court on Monday to defend the technology giant’s deep partnership with OpenAI, as the high-profile legal battle between Elon Musk and Sam Altman intensified in Oakland, California.
Testifying in the closely watched Musk v Altman trial, Nadella said Musk never personally raised concerns with him that Microsoft’s investments in OpenAI violated any commitments tied to the artificial intelligence company’s nonprofit mission.
Satya Nadella took the stand in federal court Monday and defended Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar OpenAI partnership. He also told the court Musk never personally raised concerns with him about those investments violating OpenAI’s nonprofit mission. That’s a pretty big point for the defense. And he called the 2023 Altman firing saga "amateur city." The CEO of one of the most valuable companies on earth just testified under oath that the governance of the biggest AI lab in the world was — amateur city. Sure, but legally the question is whether Musk can prove an actual breach of fiduciary duty or mission commitments. And Nadella just punched a hole in the "I warned them" story. Sure. But the bigger problem is still there: a for-profit Microsoft sitting at the center of what was supposed to be a safety-first nonprofit AI lab. Win or lose, that’s the story this trial keeps circling back to. You’ll find links to every story we covered today in the show notes, so if something caught your ear, that’s where to dig in a little deeper.
That’s Musk v Altman Daily for this Wednesday, May thirteenth. This is a Lantern Podcast.