OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA — A federal jury in Oakland, California, dismissed Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI after a three-week trial, finding that the case had missed a statutory deadline. The verdict concluded a courtroom contest pitting Musk against OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman.

In a court filing, Musk accused OpenAI of betraying its charitable mission by going behind his back and unjustly enriching its founders. OpenAI countered that he had supported plans to form a for-profit company and that he filed his 2024 lawsuit to undercut its success while building his own artificial intelligence company, xAI.

OpenAI began in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to developing artificial intelligence for the common good. It is now a capitalistic enterprise valued at $852 billion. The company is not yet profitable but is likely headed for an initial public offering as soon as later this year.

Altman and Musk vied for leadership of the organization in its early years, and Musk attempted to fold the laboratory into Tesla. OpenAI leaders resisted that effort, and he quit the board in 2018.

More than five years before introducing ChatGPT, OpenAI taught an AI system to beat professional Dota 2 players. In 2017, at a Seattle competition, the then-nonprofit beat a top Dota 2 player in a livestreamed match.

Altman described Musk's reaction to the demonstration. "He was impressed. And then immediately after the Dota win, Mr. Musk said he thought we really need to get more serious and figure out how to get way more capital."

In a 2018 email to Altman and other OpenAI co-founders, Musk wrote that the funding ambitions needed to expand dramatically. "Even raising several hundred million won't be enough. This needs billions per year immediately or forget it."

Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist at OpenAI, described the technical rationale behind the push for scale. "The realization is that to make progress in AI, you need a big computer. And you need the big computer because the brain is a big computer. You have a hundred billion neurons and a hundred trillion synapses in the brain."

Microsoft was looking for a way to compete with Google in artificial intelligence research at the time of its investment in OpenAI. OpenAI told Microsoft that more data and computing resources were needed for its AI systems to grow more powerful.