Zoe Schiffer

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Mark Leda is our San Francisco studio engineer.

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And Katie Drebin is Wired's global editorial director.

Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley.

I'm Zoe Schiffer, Director of Business and Industry.

And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.

Today on the show, we're going to a federal courthouse in Oakland, California, to take a look at what has been going down in the Elon Musk versus Sam Altman trial.

We're going to get into how the trial goes way beyond the rivalry between these two guys and could have major implications both for open AI, but also for the AI industry at large.

Okay, so let's kick things off with the Elon Musk versus Sam Altman trial.

So the jury trial kicked off earlier this week, but the legal feud between these two guys dates back to 2024.

Back then, Musk sued OpenAI, basically alleging two things.

First, he said that the company had strayed from its founding mission to create AI that benefits all of humanity.

And second, that he was misled by Sam Altman and OpenAI's president, Greg Brockman, into contributing millions of dollars because he thought he was supporting a nonprofit.

As you might have guessed, OpenAI's very weird structure is kind of central to this dispute.

While its nonprofit arm controls the company, it created a for-profit arm to raise outside capital, and now it's trying to become a public benefit corporation.

OpenAI has denied the allegations.

They're saying that Musk just wants to hurt OpenAI because now he has a competitive AI lab, which is XAI.

And in fact, the lawsuit was only filed after Musk started XAI, although the feud has been going on basically since Elon Musk left OpenAI years and years ago.