Lawyers for Elon Musk and OpenAI made their closing arguments this week, and now it’s up to jurors to decide whether OpenAI did anything wrong as it’s transformed into a slightly-more-for-profit organization.
But as Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I noted on the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, a big theme in the trial’s final days was whether OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is trustworthy — for example, Musk’s attorney Steve Molo grilled Altman about whether statements he’d made during congressional testimony were truthful.
Kirsten noted that Musk has made plenty of misleading statements of his own, and that trust isn’t just an issue for Altman.
“This is a fundamental question [for] a lot of tech journalists, policymakers, and more and more consumers, about all the AI labs,” she said. “It’s really come down to trust, because we don’t have the insight, necessarily — these are all privately held companies, there’s a lot behind the veil still.”
Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Anthony Ha: [The end of the trial] led to this really provocative headline from one of our writers, Tim Fernholz, [that] just says, “Who trusts Sam Altman?” Does anyone want to take a stab at answering this?
Kirsten Korosec: Yeah, Anthony, I’m going to throw it right back to you. Do you trust Sam Altman?
Anthony: It’s an interesting question because it feels like something that’s kind of a wild question to discuss in a journalistic context, but actually that’s the core of the trial, in a lot of ways.
Sean O’Kane: That’s not a yes.
Anthony: And it actually seems to be [at the] core of understanding so much of what’s happened at OpenAI, especially this big executive power struggle that they now call The Blip.
It just seems like a lot of people who’ve worked with Altman don’t trust him. And he’s acknowledged this a little bit, because he’ll talk about the fact that he recognizes he’s been conflict averse, telling people what they want to hear, and he’s trying to work on that.
I mean, it sounds plausible, and I can understand how that can lead to misunderstandings in some situations. [But] I’m also a very …