OAKLAND — Elon Musk has filed a lawsuit in Oakland seeking to unwind OpenAI's conversion to a for-profit enterprise, remove Sam Altman and Greg Brockman from the organization, and recover up to $150 billion in damages. Musk alleges that Altman and Brockman cheated him by converting OpenAI into a for-profit entity after he left the organization in 2018.

OpenAI began as a not-for-profit organization. In 2015, Musk suggested setting up a for-profit entity alongside the OpenAI foundation. He is currently worth $651 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

OpenAI called the lawsuit an unlawful campaign of harassment and countersued Musk in early April. The company said it has more than 900 million weekly active users.

OpenAI has been the industry leader since launching ChatGPT in November 2022. The company did not meet the revenue targets needed to support its data center spending and plans to issue shares to the public. The report of OpenAI's revenue miss prompted a brief sell-off in artificial intelligence-related stocks, though later in the week the Nasdaq and the S.&P. 500 rallied to new highs.

Companies developing generative A.I. models include OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft reported healthy growth in revenues and profits in the first quarter of 2026, some of which was connected to A.I. The four companies estimate that they will spend more than $700 billion on A.I. investments in 2026, much of it devoted to their cloud-computing divisions. By comparison, total business investment in the United Kingdom was about $430 billion last year. Other firms investing heavily in A.I. infrastructure include Oracle, CoreWeave, Nscale, and Lambda. The hyperscalers generated nearly $150 billion in net income combined in the latest quarter, while the A.I. debt binge has topped $300 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Anthropic released Claude Code, its agentic coding agent, last year and subsequently released a web-based version. In April 2026, the company said it had more than 300,000 business customers, and its run rate revenue rose from about $1 billion in January 2025 to $30 billion. Two years ago, Anthropic had a dozen customers spending more than $1 million each annually on its services; by February 2026, it had more than 500 such customers. OpenAI and Anthropic depend on successive capital injections from outside investors.

A survey by McKinsey released in November found that 94% of respondents had not yet seen measurable value from their A.I. investments. A survey by Dataiku of corporate chief information officers found that more than two-thirds said A.I. budgets would likely be frozen or cut if financial targets were not reached by mid-2026.