OpenAI CEO Sam Altman faced what sounds like a truly awful day on the stand this week during cross-examination in the ongoing Musk v. Altman court saga, as the opposing counsel hammered him with ruthless questions about his growing record of alleged dishonesty.
Steven Molo, the lead attorney for plaintiff Elon Musk, attacked Altman with a series of questions about his rumored mendaciousness — or, as the former OpenAI board put it in its fantastically botched 2023 attempt to oust Altman from his chief executive role, the OpenAI leader’s alleged failure to be “consistently candid” with other executives.
“Are you completely trustworthy?” Molo asked Altman, who responded: “I believe so.”
“You don’t know whether you’re completely trustworthy?” Molo pressed back.
“I’ll just amend my answer to yes,” Altman shot back. Later, he added: “I believe I am an honest and trustworthy business person.”
Molo then pressed Altman on specific — and extremely unflattering — statements given by other witnesses during the trial, reminding Altman that he was referred to as “deceptive and a liar” by former OpenAI colleagues.
Indeed, during a video deposition, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer Mira Murati told lawyers that Altman had made false statements to her about safety practices, allegedly telling her that company’s lawyers had cleared a new AI model to bypass regular safety procedures when they hadn’t. She also confirmed that Altman had “undermined” her as CTO and “pitted” executives against each other. (Murati exited OpenAI after Altman’s brief firing-and-rehiring and is now CEO at an AI lab called Thinking Machines.) And former OpenAI board member Tasha McCauley testified in her video deposition that there were “repeated crisis events stemming from Sam’s behavior.”
“We had real doubts that we could trust what the CEO was telling us,” McCauley continued, stating that Altman’s fibbing fed a “toxic culture” of dishonesty.
Molo doubled down on these testimonies while grilling Altman, asking if the CEO was “aware” that McCauley had accused him of “creating a toxic culture of lying in OpenAI.”
Altman, for his part, told Molo he did “not hear” McCauley’s testimony.
Brutal! Though whether Molo convincingly painted Altman as a liar — and whether Altman’s trustworthiness impacts the allegation at the heart of the lawsuit, which is that OpenAI’s transition to becoming a for-profit company was illegal — is up to a jury to decide. That in mind, it could be in Altman’s favor that Musk’s cross-examination wasn’t exactly flattering, either.
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