Covering this trial begins at about 6 a.m., sometimes earlier, with a trip to the federal courthouse in downtown Oakland, Calif. Because the Silicon Valley moguls Elon Musk and Sam Altman often appear in court, people line up outside the building before the sun comes up.
On Tuesday, a group of young artificial intelligence safety researchers arrived in the early morning with Subway sandwiches. They are among those who believe that Mr. Musk’s lawsuit could shift the direction of the global A.I. race. Mr. Musk is claiming that OpenAI, which he founded with Mr. Altman and others in 2015, violated the original mission of the A.I. lab by putting commercial interests over the good of humanity.
I’m covering the trial with my colleague Mike Isaac, but the court gave The New York Times only one press pass. I take it one day; he gets it the next. Even with the pass, I have to show up at least an hour before the 8 a.m. start time. The idea is that if you have a pass, you can skip the line. But for this blockbuster trial, even the express entrance to the courthouse is painfully slow. It gets clogged with all the lawyers hired by Mr. Musk and the two companies he’s suing: OpenAI and Microsoft, the lab’s chief financial and technological partner.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
For security reasons, Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman enter from the basement. But they still have to walk through the metal detectors just inside the building’s front doors. When they arrive, the many photographers standing outside the building suddenly rush toward those doors, trying to snap pictures of the tech moguls through the glass. (Photography is not allowed inside the federal courthouse.)
Once we enter the courtroom, Mike and I sit on wooden benches in the gallery alongside about 40 other reporters from various outlets. One of the perks of covering a trial near Silicon Valley is that we can use laptops and phones inside the courtroom. In places like Washington, D.C., courts often ban the use of electronic devices. That means we can type out our stories and blog posts and send them to editors right away. But we’re still forbidden from taking photos, and we’re not allowed to record audio or video.
For two days running, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is presiding over the trial, admonished people for recording court proceedings and snapping pictures from the overflow room, which holds dozens of people who did not get a spot in the courtroom. If they continued, she said, she would confiscate their devices and shutdown the overflow room.
The figure that most eyes focus on is Mr. Musk, the world’s richest person. We all recognize him from photos, but his mannerisms are quirkier than you might think. He often purses his lips, which you can see in one of the photos captured by Jason Henry, the freelance photographer hired by The Times to stand outside the courthouse. And as Mr. Musk marched out of the courtroom on Tuesday afternoon, he was clutching what appeared to be a small, soft ball, squeezing it over and over again.
Mr. Altman is less conspicuous. This week, a fellow reporter who had never seen him in person made a point of saying he was much shorter than she had thought. On Monday, before jury selection, Mr. Altman approached me and said, “I hope you enjoy this.” Later, someone who seemed to be one of Mr. Musk’s lawyers replied to another Times reporter who had posted that quote on social media, saying, “What can we do about that?”
When Mr. Musk took the stand on Tuesday and Wednesday, Mike and I got a pretty good taste of the two very different sides of his personality — though our view was often blocked by lawyers and giant computer displays used to show court evidence. When Mr. Musk was questioned by his own lawyer, he calmly explained that he and his many tech companies were on a mission to save the world. Under cross-examination, he grew combative, occasionally raising his voice and tossing sly insults at OpenAI’s lead counsel.
Mr. Musk left OpenAI less than three years after he founded the lab with Mr. Altman. Now, they don’t exactly like each other. On social media, Mr. Musk recently called his old co-founder “Scam Altman.”
When Mr. Musk arrived in court for the first time on Tuesday, the judge lit into him for posting about the trial on X, the social media platform he owns. He said he was just responding to things that OpenAI had posted online. So the judge told both Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman to start with a “clean slate” and to “keep things to a minimum” on social media.
They agreed. We’ll see if that sticks.
Cade Metz is a Times reporter who writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.
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