Two days before the start of the blockbuster trial pitting Elon Musk against the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, Mr. Musk sent a text message to Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and co-founder, asking if he was interested in settling the case.
When Mr. Brockman suggested both sides drop their claims, Mr. Musk responded with a text attacking Mr. Brockman and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive. “By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America. If you insist, so it will be,” he wrote, according to a document filed in the trial.
As the trial’s second week kicked off in an Oakland, Calif., federal courthouse on Monday, it was unclear if the public standing of Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman had changed at all. But Mr. Brockman spent most of the day on the witness stand defending his credibility against suggestions that his A.I. work was driven by greed.
Steven Molo, Mr. Musk’s lead lawyer, showed evidence that while Mr. Brockman had never invested money in OpenAI, he now owned a stake worth about $30 billion.
“Do you believe that OpenAI has maintained the moral high ground by allowing you to have a stake with close to $30 billion?” Mr. Molo asked.
The question of OpenAI’s motivations for building A.I. is a centerpiece of Mr. Musk’s lawsuit against the company. He claims that Mr. Altman and others breached OpenAI’s founding agreement by putting commercial gain over its earlier promise to build safe A.I. for the sake of humanity.
He is asking for $150 billion in damages and a court order that would remove Mr. Altman from the OpenAI board of directors. He also wants an order unraveling the for-profit company structure that the company adopted last year.
Mr. Musk helped create OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 along with Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and a group of A.I. researchers. They vowed to freely share its technologies with the rest of the world. But Mr. Musk left the organization less than three years later after a power struggle. He later founded his own artificial intelligence start-up, xAI.
OpenAI’s legal team has argued that Mr. Musk’s suit amounts to “sour grapes.”
Mr. Brockman, calmly responding to Mr. Molo’s questions, said OpenAI had not veered from its original promise and that he was not driven primarily by money. “Solving for the mission has always been my primary motivation,” he said, wearing a blue suit with his hair closely cropped, as always. “It remains so today.”
Mr. Molo showed an email that Mr. Brockman sent in 2015 to Yahoo’s chief executive at the time, Marissa Mayer, as he and others were working on what would become OpenAI. In the email, Mr. Brockman said he was donating $100,000 to the new organization. But he did not end up making a donation.
“Did you think it was morally bankrupt to say you would donate $100,000 and then not do that?” Mr. Molo asked. “No,” Mr. Brockman responded.
As Mr. Brockman testified, Mr. Altman listened intently, sitting behind the OpenAI legal team. Just behind him, Mr. Brockman’s wife, Anna Brockman, sat on the edge of her seat, looking toward the stand.
Mr. Molo repeatedly quoted from a journal that Mr. Brockman kept in 2017 and 2018 as OpenAI’s co-founders realized the nonprofit could not raise the enormous amounts of money it would need. They discussed whether they should attach the lab to a for-profit company.
As Mr. Brockman and others started to tussle with Mr. Musk over the future of the lab, he wrote, “This is the only chance we have to get out from Elon. Is he the ‘glorious leader’ that I would pick? We truly have a chance to make this happen. Financially, what will take me to $1B?”
Mr. Molo repeatedly asked Mr. Brockman if this meant he was primarily interested in financial gain. Mr. Brockman said no, and that he was trying to decide whether to continue to build OpenAI with Mr. Musk or move it in a new direction.
“There was a fork in the road,” he said. “Do we accept Elon’s terms?”
Under questioning from Sarah Eddy, one of OpenAI’s lawyers, Mr. Brockman said he never misled Mr. Musk about his intentions with OpenAI. He also said that as Mr. Musk was leaving OpenAI, he told Mr. Brockman that he intended to create a new effort to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., essentially a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.
Mr. Musk said there had to be a serious competitor to Google in the race to A.G.I. and OpenAI wouldn’t be able to do it. So he intended to build that competitor at Tesla, Mr. Brockman said.
“As far as you know, has Tesla ever been a nonprofit?” Ms. Eddy asked. “No,” Mr. Brockman said. He was expected to return to the witness stand on Tuesday.
Before Mr. Brockman testified, the nine-member jury heard from Stuart Russell, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in A.I. safety. Dr. Russell said that dangers could emerge as commercial companies raced to build A.G.I.
“Whichever company develops A.G.I. first would have a significant advantage that would then increase relative to the other companies,” Dr. Russell said. “That company — or a small handful of companies — may control a majority of economic activity on the planet and governments would become subordinate to these companies.”
Mr. Musk’s case was dealt a blow on Friday when Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is presiding over the case, struck parts of the testimony of Jared Birchall, who manages Mr. Musk’s family office. While being questioned by Mr. Musk’s legal team on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Birchall discussed a $97.4 billion bid by Mr. Musk and others to purchase OpenAI’s assets last year.
He said he was concerned that Mr. Altman was inappropriately removing value from the OpenAI nonprofit as he and others created a new for-profit company in anticipation of a public offering. He accused Mr. Altman of “sitting on both sides of the negotiations” as those plans were made.
But Judge Gonzalez Rogers ordered Mr. Birchall’s discussion of the bid removed from his testimony because he did not have personal knowledge of Mr. Altman’s involvement in the negotiations.
Mr. Birchall acknowledged that he had arranged the $97.4 billion bid with Marc Toberoff, one of the lawyers representing Mr. Musk in his suit against OpenAI.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
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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