Indeed, if Musk were to win his bid, that could be devastating for OpenAI, especially as it prepares this year for a potential initial public offering. Musk seeks $150bn in damages from the company and one of its top investors, Microsoft. He also seeks to return OpenAI to a non-profit, to remove Altman and Brockman as leaders of the for-profit, and to boot Altman off the non-profit board.

Yet, to assume that the future of AI development will be determined by a personality contest misses the point. Yes, Brockman’s diary entries are revealing, as was former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati’s testimony about Altman pitting executives against each other, confirming my previous reporting.

But fixating on questions of whether Altman is untrustworthy, or whether Musk is even less so distracts from a far deeper problem. If OpenAI lost its footing as the AI industry frontrunner, another barely distinguishable competitor – Musk’s xAI or other – would simply replace it. That includes companies like Anthropic, who enjoy a better reputation yet engage in many similar behaviors like compromising careful decision-making for speed, disregarding intellectual property, and aggressively scaling their computing infrastructure to the detriment of communities."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/commentisfree/2026/may/14/elon-musk-sam-altman-ai-feud

#AI #GenerativeAI #OpenAI #Musk #BigTech #xAI #Anthropic