LEILA FADEL, HOST:
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is defending himself against Elon Musk's accusations that he stole a charity by converting OpenAI into a for-profit company. Altman and Musk cofounded the maker of ChatGPT a decade ago. Altman testified Tuesday in Musk's suit against him. The case argues that Altman and others moved away from the company's founding mission to create safe artificial intelligence to benefit humanity. Mike Isaac is a tech correspondent for The New York Times who's covering the trial in Oakland, California, and he joins me now. Good morning. Welcome to the program, Mike.
MIKE ISAAC: Hey. Thanks for having me.
FADEL: What was Sam Altman's main defense on Tuesday in court?
ISAAC: Well, this case really has come down to the idea of, frankly, which billionaire you believe is doing this the right way. You know, on the one hand, we have Elon Musk, who is no longer a part of OpenAI but says he only wanted to build AI responsibly and was tricked into leaving the entity with Sam Altman at the helm. Altman essentially says, look, you left the company in 2018 and said that you were done with it. You never - and you haven't contested that in the few years since you left, and now you're suing later on because you're building a for-profit competitor to us called xAI, which is also developing artificial intelligence.
FADEL: Now, an example came up in court of Musk suggesting a deal that would turn OpenAI into a for-profit.
ISAAC: That's right. One of the things that the OpenAI side is saying is, like, look, there are plenty of emails in the past that has Elon Musk essentially speaking out of both sides of his mouth and saying, we could've done an earlier deal to make this into a company with equity structures that has Elon Musk in control over it and potentially profiting from it. And the idea being that, you know, Elon wants to say he's been doing this sort of selfless building of AI for years now. But actually, he has been interested in taking a stake of his own just even as he's saying he hasn't been.
FADEL: How has Musk characterized Altman's trustworthiness, and how did Altman respond?
ISAAC: So Sam Altman's testimony was actually pretty brutal when Elon Musk's lawyers went after him. Basically, it became an attack on Sam Altman's character and the idea that Sam Altman - this guy who 10 years ago in private was saying he wanted to build AI safely with Elon Musk - can no longer basically be trusted to do so. And Elon Musk's attorneys trotted out, like, a laundry list of things that said, essentially, everyone in Sam Altman's life felt that he could not be trusted from the CTO of the company, Mira Murati, to the idea of self-dealing and investing in companies that OpenAI would later purchase or make deals with or to even being potentially kicked out of other companies that he founded in the past. It was really just a big referendum on is Sam Altman a trustworthy person? And it was pretty devastating.
FADEL: How did Altman respond to Musk's characterization of him in court?
ISAAC: Altman basically said, look, the picture that you're painting of me is not something that I'm familiar with. I know that people tend to have a lot of problems with me, and I feel hurt by their misunderstandings, but I feel like that's an unfair characterization. And instead of getting combative, like, say, Elon Musk did on the stand, Altman was trying to - I would say - strike a humble tone while also painting it as a misunderstanding.
FADEL: That's New York Times tech correspondent Mike Isaac. Thank you, Mike.
ISAAC: Thank you so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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