Trial Evidence Shows Musk Sought to Recruit Altman for Tesla AI Lab
SAN FRANCISCO — Trial evidence in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI shows that in 2017, Musk explored recruiting Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis to lead a rival AI laboratory at Tesla, Wired reported.
Messages between Shivon Zilis, a venture capitalist who later joined Tesla and Neuralink, and Tesla executives show discussions about establishing a competing AI research operation that would be housed within the electric vehicle company, the report said.
The disclosure adds new context to the dispute between Musk and Altman, which has escalated from a public disagreement into active litigation. Musk has sued OpenAI, alleging the company abandoned its founding nonprofit mission by partnering with Microsoft and pursuing profits. OpenAI has contested those claims.
The 2017 communications suggest Musk was already contemplating alternatives to OpenAI before his 2018 departure from the organization’s board. The messages indicate Musk was actively strategizing about how to maintain influence over the trajectory of advanced AI development, according to the report.
The revelation that Altman himself was considered as a potential recruit to lead the Tesla effort undercuts some of Musk’s legal arguments that Altman unilaterally steered OpenAI away from its original mission, legal observers noted. If Musk was willing to bring Altman into a for-profit Tesla venture, it complicates the narrative that Altman’s commercial instincts were a betrayal of shared principles.
Hassabis, who co-founded DeepMind and now leads Google DeepMind, was also mentioned as a potential leader for the proposed Tesla AI lab, according to the trial evidence. Hassabis has led DeepMind since its acquisition by Google in 2014.
The trial testimony comes as OpenAI is in the process of converting from its unusual capped-profit structure to a more traditional corporate form. Musk has sought to block that conversion through his lawsuit, arguing it would complete the abandonment of OpenAI’s charitable purpose.
Musk went on to found xAI in 2023, which has developed the Grok family of AI models. The company has raised billions in venture capital and operates one of the largest AI training clusters in the world.
Neither Tesla nor OpenAI immediately responded to requests for comment on the trial disclosures.
