Stage Set for Elon Musk's Court Battle with OpenAI

Elon Musk's lawsuit accusing high-profile artificial intelligence company OpenAI of betraying its non-profit mission heads for trial on Monday with the selection of jurors.

The legal clash in a courtroom across the bay from San Francisco pits the world's richest person against a startup Musk once backed and now competes with in the booming AI sector. OpenAI's ChatGPT is a formidable rival to the chatbot Grok, made by Musk's xAI



lab.

While Musk's lawsuit is part of a feud between him and OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman, it spotlights a debate as to whether AI should ultimately serve to benefit a privileged few or society as a whole. 

Court filings lay out how Altman convinced Musk to back OpenAI in 2015, acting as a co-founder for a non-profit lab whose technology "would belong to the world." Musk pumped millions of dollars into the lab, which he subsequently left.