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Elon Musk\u2019s legal effort to dismantle OpenAI may hinge on how its for-profit subsidiary enhances or detracts from the frontier lab\u2019s founding mission of ensuring that humanity benefits from artificial general intelligence.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, a federal court in Oakland, California, heard a former employee and board member say the company\u2019s efforts to push AI products into the marketplace compromised its commitment to AI safety.<\/p>\n
Rosie Campbell joined the company\u2019s AGI readiness team in 2021, and she left OpenAI in 2024 after her team was disbanded. Another safety-focused team, the Super Alignment team, was shut down in the same time period.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I joined, it was very research-focused and common for people to talk about AGI and safety issues,\u201d she testified. \u201cOver time it became more like a product-focused organization.\u201d<\/p>\n
Under cross-examination, Campbell acknowledged that significant funding was likely necessary for the lab\u2019s goal of building AGI but said creating a super-intelligent computer model without the right safety measures in place wouldn\u2019t fit with the mission of the organization she originally joined.<\/p>\n
Campbell pointed to an incident where Microsoft deployed a version of the company\u2019s GPT-4 model in India through its Bing search engine before the model had been evaluated by the company\u2019s Deployment Safety Board (DSB). The model itself did not present a huge risk, she said, but the company needed \u201cto set strong precedents as the technology gets more powerful. We want to have good safety processes in place we know are being followed reliably.\u201d<\/p>\n
OpenAI\u2019s attorneys also had Campbell admit that in her \u201cspeculative opinion,\u201d OpenAI\u2019s safety approach is superior to that at xAI, the AI company that Musk founded that was acquired by SpaceX earlier this year.<\/p>\n
Techcrunch event<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> OpenAI releases evaluations of its models and shares a safety framework publicly, but the company declined to comment on its current approach to AGI alignment. Dylan Scandinaro, its current head of preparedness, was hired from Anthropic in February. Altman said the hire would let him \u201csleep better tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n The deployment of GPT-4 in India, however, was one of the red flags that led OpenAI\u2019s non-profit board to briefly fire CEO Sam Altman in 2023. That incident took place after employees, including then-chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and then-CTO Mira Murati, complained about Altman\u2019s conflict-averse management style. Tasha McCauley, a member of the board at the time, testified about concerns that Altman was not forthcoming enough with the board for its unusual structure to function.<\/p>\n McCauley also discussed a widely reported pattern of Altman misleading the board. Notably, Altman lied to another board member about McCauley\u2019s intention to remove Helen Toner, a third board member who published a white paper that included some implied criticism of OpenAI\u2019s safety policy. Altman also failed to inform the board about the decision to launch ChatGPT publicly, and members were concerned about his lack of disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are a non-profit board and our mandate was to be able to oversee the for-profit underneath us,\u201d McCauley told the court. \u201cOur primary way to do that was being called into question. We did not have a high degree of confidence at all to trust that the information being conveyed to us allowed us to make decisions in an informed way.\u201d<\/p>\n However, the decision to boot Altman came at the same time as a tender offer to the company\u2019s employees. McCauley said that when OpenAI\u2019s staff started to side with Altman and Microsoft worked to restore the status quo, the board ultimately reversed course, with the members opposed to Altman stepping down. <\/p>\n The apparent failure of the non-profit board to influence the for-profit organization goes directly to Musk\u2019s case that the transformation of OpenAI from research organization into one of the largest private companies in the world broke the implicit agreement of the organization\u2019s founders.<\/p>\n David Schizer, a former dean of Columbia Law School who is being paid by Musk\u2019s team to act as an expert witness, echoed McCauley\u2019s concerns.<\/p>\n \u201cOpenAI has emphasized that a key part of its mission is safety and they are going to prioritize safety over profits,\u201d Schizer said. \u201cPart of that is taking safety rules seriously, if something needs to be subject to safety review, it needs to happen. What matters is the process issue.\u201d<\/p>\n With AI already deeply embedded in for-profit companies, the issue goes far beyond a single lab. McCauley said the failures of internal governance at OpenAI should be a reason to embrace stronger government regulation of advanced AI \u2014 \u201c[if] it all comes down to one CEO making those decisions, and we have the public good at stake, that\u2019s very suboptimal.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n