Musk drops most claims against OpenAI and Altman ahead of trial

Two days before jury selection opened, Elon Musk dropped all but two of the claims in his lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, cutting a suit that had run to 26 claims down to allegations of unjust enrichment and breach of charitable trust. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers approved Musk’s request to streamline the case for trial, dropping fraud and related counts along the way.

The two surviving claims kept intact the core of Musk’s argument: that OpenAI’s 2019 shift from a pure nonprofit toward a capped-profit structure, and its billions in funding from Microsoft, betrayed commitments made when he helped found and fund the organisation in 2015, and that the founding pledges amounted to an enforceable charitable trust rather than ordinary corporate promises. Musk was seeking as much as $134 billion in damages, directed to OpenAI’s nonprofit rather than to himself, plus orders restoring nonprofit control and removing Altman and Brockman from OpenAI’s board.

OpenAI’s lawyers characterised the narrowing as tactical rather than a concession, calling Musk’s late changes to his sought remedies a “legal ambush” and an “11th-hour surprise” so close to trial, and maintaining more broadly that his claims amounted to “baseless harassment” from a commercial rival. The case proceeded to trial two days later, with jury selection beginning under a structure in which a nine-member jury would sit in an advisory capacity, guiding but not binding Judge Gonzalez Rogers’s eventual ruling. The jury returned its verdict on 18 May 2026, dismissing the remaining claims on statute-of-limitations grounds without ruling on whether the alleged breach of trust had occurred.