\u201cWe are hopeful that these risks can be adequately mitigated with sufficient guidance from the scientific community, policymakers, and the public. However, AI companies have strong financial incentives to avoid effective oversight, and we do not believe bespoke structures of corporate governance are sufficient to change this.\u201d<\/p>\n
To this day, it remains unclear whether Altman\u2019s talk about benefiting humanity was anything more than a savvy sales pitch designed to attract top AI talent and allay the concerns of federal regulators<\/a>. This is one of the key questions trial watchers will be most keen to see answered.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s quite typical for scientific research organizations to do all the hard work of the research before their IP is sold to a for-profit company for practical purposes,\u201d said Rose Chan Loui, founding executive director of the Lowell Milken Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofits at UCLA Law.<\/p>\n What makes OpenAI unusual, Chan Loui said, is how explicitly and repeatedly the AI developer bound itself to promising its AI would be developed safely and for the benefit of all of humanity. \u201cWhen they opened up to investment and formed the subsidiary, they recommitted to that purpose. They tied themselves even more tightly.\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI employees who left over concerns about the company\u2019s direction, has cultivated a reputation as the more safety-conscious, ethically serious player in the AI race, the light gray hat to OpenAI\u2019s dark gray one. Anthropic chose to incorporate as a public benefit corporation from the beginning, rather than a nonprofit, because a public benefit corporation has far more legal flexibility. \u201cAnthropic may be behaving in a way that the public thinks is more charitable, but its legal duties to do so are a lot lower than OpenAI\u2019s,\u201d Horwitz said.<\/p>\n For legal eagles following this case, it\u2019s curious that Musk is the plaintiff, rather than California\u2019s attorney general, who is the primary legal guardian of charitable assets in the state, where most of OpenAI\u2019s assets are located. But in 2025, Attorney General Rob Bonta negotiated a binding memorandum of understanding<\/a> with OpenAI. The AG in Delaware, where OpenAI is incorporated, issued a parallel statement of non-objection.<\/p>\n A coalition of more than 30 California foundations and nonprofit organizations, including the San Francisco Foundation and TechEquity, urged Bonta<\/a> to take immediate legal action to protect OpenAI\u2019s charitable assets, arguing his office had both the authority and the responsibility to do so.<\/p>\nBut is Musk the right party to bring this suit?<\/h2>\n
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