In the first week of Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, the biggest takeaway was the admission that xAI distills ChatGPT.

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Musk donated $38 million to help found OpenAI, a company now valued at $800 billion. What happened during the first week of the "century trial" where he sued the company, labeling it a "deceptive non-profit"? (Context: Sam Altman reportedly promised to spend $600 billion on computing power to "accelerate OpenAI's IPO by year-end," while the CFO worries about cash depletion in 5 years.) (Background: xAI quietly launched Grok 4.3, capable of directly generating Word, PPT, and Excel files, effectively trampling Microsoft's moat.) Taking the witness stand and calling himself a fool, Musk accused Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in a federal court in Oakland, California, of plundering the non-profit and blocking OpenAI from completing its restructuring. According to on-site reporting by MIT Technology trial reporter Michelle Kim, Musk divided his relationship with OpenAI into three phases during his testimony. The first phase was "passionate support": In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI with Altman and Brockman, aiming to create a non-profit AI lab that could serve as a counterweight to Google. Musk cited words from Google co-founder Page as his motivation. He asked Page what would happen if AI tried to eliminate humanity, to which Page replied, "As long as the AI survives, that's all that matters." Musk said that because of this, he believed there was a need for an organization that did not pursue profit and prioritized safety above all else. The second phase was "loss of faith": He began to doubt the truthfulness of what Altman was telling him. The third phase was "conviction of being plundered": The turning point occurred at the end of 2022. Trial records show that after learning Microsoft would invest $10 billion in OpenAI, Musk messaged Altman: "What the hell is going on? This is a deceptive bait-and-switch." In Musk's eyes, the line had been crossed—from a non-profit lab built on the promise of safety to a commercial entity fueled by $10 billion from Microsoft. He did the math on the stand: "I gave them $38 million in essentially free money, and they used it to build a company now worth $800 billion." Musk's demand is to remove Altman and Brockman from their positions and to revoke the restructuring of OpenAI into a "non-profit + for-profit subsidiary" model. If he wins, it could directly disrupt OpenAI's plans for an IPO at a valuation of approximately $1 trillion. OpenAI's appointed lawyer, William Savitt, presented two emails from Musk in court. The first, written in 2017, shows Musk informing a Tesla VP that he intended to poach OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy, stating: "The OpenAI people will want to kill me. But it has to be done." The second was sent to a Neuralink co-founder, suggesting they could poach talent directly from OpenAI. Musk's response was: "It's a free world, I cannot restrict them from recruiting people from other companies." Savitt also pointed out that one of the core arguments in Musk's lawsuit is that OpenAI deviated from its non-profit mission to become a closed-source commercial company. Yet, xAI itself is a closed-source, for-profit enterprise. Furthermore, xAI sued the state of Colorado in April 2026 over an AI anti-discrimination bill, creating a clear discrepancy with the AI safety banner Musk held high in court. The most damaging moment of the first week of the trial came when, under questioning by Savitt, Musk admitted that xAI "partially" distilled OpenAI's models. Distillation, simply put, is having a smaller AI model mimic the behavior of a larger model—not by directly copying code, but by learning from the model's output. Musk's defense was: "Using other AIs to validate your own AI is standard industry practice." While this claim has some technical merit, its persuasiveness is significantly weakened in the context of his simultaneous accusation that OpenAI is profiting improperly. Next week, UC Berkeley computer scientist Stuart Russell will testify on AI safety, and Brockman will also take the stand for cross-examination. 📍Related Reports📍 A person can be both a victim and a perpetrator; these are not mutually exclusive in the eyes of the law. What Musk bought with his $38 million is not just $800 billion worth of anger, but a situation that forced him onto the witness stand, only to admit that xAI is doing the exact same thing. The outcome of this lawsuit will ultimately be decided by Judge Gonzalez Rogers—not by whose moral narrative is more compelling.

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