Elon Musk Had'Hair-Raising' Idea of Passing OpenAI Onto His Kids, Sam Altman Says Musk's lawyers questioned Altman over allegations of deception and his network of financial investments, but the OpenAI CEO painted a picture of Musk as obsessed with controlling the company. Sam Altman took to the witness stand to defend his reputation in the trial on Tuesday, as Elon Musk's lawyers peppered the OpenAI CEO with hours of questions regarding his alleged history of deceptive behavior . The cross examination was a much needed win for Musk, who has so far struggled to make a convincing case. Tuesday's testimony included several heated exchanges in which the OpenAI CEO had to respond to allegations from former colleagues suggesting he's untrustworthy . Highlighting this evidence is not only important for Musk winning over a jury, but also for beating OpenAI in the court of public opinion.

In a United States court, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has rejected claims from fellow tech mogul Elon Musk that he betrayed the artificial intelligence company's original vision. Tuesday marked the start of Altman's testimony in a contentious trial unfolding in Oakland, California, between some of tech's richest and most powerful titans. He alleged that OpenAI's leader persuaded him to invest $38bn, based on a goal of improving humanity, only to see the company pivot to a for-profit venture in 2019. On the witness stand on Tuesday, Altman instead framed Musk as a competitor obsessed with exercising control over OpenAI. "It does not fit with my conception of the words'stealing a charity' to look at what has actually happened here," Altman told the court.

Sam Altman is questioned by OpenAI's attorney, Bill Savitt, before Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, a US district judge, at a federal courthouse in Oakland, California, on 12 May 2026 in a courtroom sketch. Sam Altman is questioned by OpenAI's attorney, Bill Savitt, before Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, a US district judge, at a federal courthouse in Oakland, California, on 12 May 2026 in a courtroom sketch. The OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, took the stand on Tuesday to defend himself and his company against a lawsuit by Elon Musk . Altman is set to be one of the final witnesses in the trial, which has pitted two of the tech industry's most powerful men against each other in a dramatic courtroom showdown. Musk has accused Altman and OpenAI of breaking the AI firm's founding agreement by restructuring it into a for-profit enterprise, alleging that Altman essentially swindled him into co-founding the company and providing tens of millions in financial backing.

Elon Musk tried to take control of OpenAI, even suggesting it could pass to his children when he dies, Sam Altman said on Tuesday. Altman is co-founder and chief executive of the artificial intelligence (AI) company behind ChatGPT. He is being sued by Musk, who accuses him of having looted a charity given OpenAI began as a non-profit. Appearing before a federal jury in Oakland, California, Altman said Musk not only backed the idea of OpenAI becoming a for-profit business, he wanted control of it for the long-run. A particularly hair-raising moment was when my cofounders asked, 'If you have control, what happens when you die?'

OpenAI has just launched Daybreak, a cybersecurity initiative that's clearly the company's competitor to Anthropic's Project Glasswing . If you'll recall, Glasswing uses Anthropic's unreleased AI model, Claude Mythos Preview, to provide its clients' cyber defense needs. It's been promising, so far: Mozilla revealed in April that Mythos helped it find and patch 271 vulnerabilities in the latest release of the Firefox browser. OpenAI says Daybreak uses its various AI models, including its specialized security agent Codex. In its announcement, the company explained that Daybreak is built around the premise that cyber defense should be built into software from the start and not just revolve around finding and fixing vulnerabilities.

Ilya Sutskever Stands by His Role in Sam Altman's OpenAI Ouster: 'I Didn't Want It to Be Destroyed' The former OpenAI chief scientist may be estranged from the company, but he still came to its defense as he testified on Monday. Elon Musk's trial against OpenAI and Microsoft entered its final stretch on Monday, with testimony from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and current OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor. Sutskever drew the spotlight, revealing an ownership stake in OpenAI's $850-billion for-profit arm that is currently worth about $7 billion. That makes him one of the largest known individual shareholders of OpenAI. Earlier in the trial, OpenAI president Greg Brockman acknowledged for the first time that he has around $30 billion worth of OpenAI shares .

Showdown between Musk and Altman has rendered the world's most wealthy comical under egalitarian eye of court For the past couple of weeks, on the fourth floor of a courthouse on a quiet street in downtown Oakland, the world's richest man and one of the world's most valuable startups have been at war over the future of artificial intelligence. Being one of the reporters in the room has felt like watching an updated, opposite-coast version of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities - ambition, ego, greed and the spectrum of social class on full display. The supporting cast has included Elon Musk fanboys, a stern judge and a who's-who of Silicon Valley's most influential people. All courtroom battles are theatre, but this one has proved to be a unique spectacle, with the judge chastising the lawyers for leading the witness, raising meritless objections and even too much coughing. With Musk on the stand, he griped that an opposing attorney had asked a leading question, to which the judge told him to "tell the jury you're not a lawyer".

Musk v. Altman week 2: OpenAI fires back, and Shivon Zilis reveals that Musk tried to poach Sam Altman OpenAI president Greg Brockman said Elon Musk wanted the company to create a for-profit entity--and endured a public peek into his diary. OpenAI president Greg Brockman, foreground, exits the U.S. District Court in Oakland, California. In the second week of the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, Musk's motivations for bringing the suit were under scrutiny. Last week, Musk took the stand, alleging that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had deceived him into donating $38 million to the company. He claimed that they'd promised to maintain it as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the benefit of humanity, only to later accept billions of dollars of investment from Microsoft and restructure the company to operate a for-profit subsidiary. This week, Brockman fired back with his side of the story, arguing that Musk had actually pushed for OpenAI to create a for-profit arm and fought a bitter battle to have "absolute control" over it.

Leaders at the tech giant were skeptical of OpenAI--but wary of pushing it into the arms of Amazon, according to evidence revealed during the trial. OpenAI's relationship with Microsoft, its longtime investor and cloud partner, has grown increasingly complicated over the years as the ChatGPT-maker has grown into a behemoth competitor . But Microsoft executives had reservations about sending additional funding to OpenAI as far back as 2018 when it was just a small nonprofit research lab, according to emails between more than a dozen Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella, shown in a federal court on Thursday during the trial. The emails show how Microsoft, at the time, wavered over what has since been held up as one of the most successful corporate partnerships in tech history. Several Microsoft executives said in the emails their visits to OpenAI did not indicate any imminent breakthroughs in developing artificial general intelligence.

When modeling class-imbalanced data, it is crucial to address the imbalance, as models trained on such data tend to be biased towards the majority classes. This problem is amplified under partial supervision, where pseudo-labels for unlabeled data are predicted based on imbalanced labeled data, propagating the bias. While recent semi-supervised models address class imbalance, they typically assume single-modal input data. However, with the growing availability of multimodal data, it is essential to leverage complementary modalities. In this article, we propose a multimodal deep generative model for semi-supervised learning under class imbalance. Our approach uses separate encoders for each modality, sharing latent variables across modalities, and simplifies joint posterior computation with a product-of-experts method. To further address class imbalance, we replace typical Gaussian distributions with Student's t-distributions for the prior, encoder, and decoder, better capturing the heavy-tailed latent distributions in imbalanced data. We derive a new objective function for training the proposed model on both labeled and unlabeled data using $γ$-power divergence. Empirical results on benchmark and real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms baseline methods in generalization, achieving superior classification performance for partially labeled multimodal data with imbalanced class distributions.