All the evidence unveiled so far in Musk v. Altman

A striking development has emerged in artificial intelligence. AI Close AI Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All AI Policy Close Policy Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All Policy Report Close Report Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Follow Follow See All Report All the evidence unveiled so far in Musk v. Altman Emails going as far back as 2015 give a glimpse into the foundations of OpenAI and the early tensions at the company. Emails going as far back as 2015 give a glimpse into the foundations of OpenAI and the early tensions at the company.

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by Hayden Field Close Hayden Field Senior AI Reporter Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Hayden Field Apr 29, 2026, 6:03 PM UTC Link Share Gift Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images Part Of Live updates from Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s court battle over the future of OpenAI see all updates Hayden Field Close Hayden Field Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Hayden Field is The Verge’s senior AI reporter.

An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets. Altman trial is underway, and that means exhibits, or the evidence to be presented in court, are being revealed piece by piece. So far, email exchanges, photos, and corporate documents are circulating from the earliest days of OpenAI — and from before the AI lab even had a name.

Some high-level takeaways: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave OpenAI an in-demand supercomputer, Musk largely drafted OpenAI’s mission and heavily influenced its early structure, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared to want to lean heavily on Y Combinator for early support for OpenAI, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever worried about Musk’s level of control over the company, and Musk highlighted the importance of a nonprofit with a mission of broadly beneficial AI. Musk’s buzzy lawsuit , which began its jury trial on Monday in a federal courtroom in California, names Altman, Brockman, and OpenAI investor Microsoft as defendants. It accuses them of breaching the company’s charitable trust, fraud, and unjust enrichment, but ultimately, Musk’s lawsuit boils down to whether or not OpenAI deviated from its founding mission of ensuring that artificial general intelligence — an often vaguely defined term that denotes AI systems that equal or surpass human intelligence — benefits all of humanity.

It’s the latest in a yearslong string of legal actions against OpenAI and its executives by Musk, who cofounded the AI lab alongside Altman and Brockman and was an early investor. (Musk also owns xAI, an AI lab that directly competes with OpenAI, and is owned by parent company SpaceX.

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.