Why this is noise: Trial testimony with no ruling, no policy change, and no near-term outcome. The safety governance questions raised are real, but the courtroom is not where they get resolved.
Key Takeaways
- Former OpenAI safety researcher Rosie Campbell testified that the company shifted from research-focused to product-focused, and disbanded her AGI readiness team in 2024
- Former board member Tasha McCauley testified that CEO Sam Altman withheld information from the board, including the decision to launch ChatGPT publicly
- Both witnesses described a non-profit board that lacked the information and authority to effectively oversee the for-profit subsidiary beneath it
- OpenAI’s deployment of GPT-4 in India via Microsoft Bing without completing safety review was cited as a key example of process breakdown
- Musk’s case centres on whether OpenAI’s for-profit transformation breached the founding agreement, with $150 billion in damages and leadership removal sought
Two witnesses for Elon Musk’s legal team gave testimony on Thursday in a trial that began with a pre-trial settlement attempt that quickly turned into a threat that placed OpenAI’s internal safety governance at the centre of the Oakland federal trial, with a former employee and a former board member each describing an organisation that prioritised product over process.
Rosie Campbell joined OpenAI’s AGI readiness team in 2021 and left in 2024 after her team was disbanded, around the same time as the Super Alignment team. “When I joined, it was very research-focused and common for people to talk about AGI and safety issues,” she testified. “Over time it became more like a product-focused organization.”
Campbell cited Microsoft’s deployment of GPT-4 through Bing in India before the model had completed evaluation by OpenAI’s Deployment Safety Board as evidence of process breakdown. The model itself was not high-risk, she said, but the precedent mattered. “We want to have good safety processes in place we know are being followed reliably.”
Our primary way to oversee the for-profit was being called into question. We did not have a high degree of confidence at all to trust that the information being conveyed to us allowed us to make decisions in an informed way. — Tasha McCauley, former board member, OpenAI
Former board member Tasha McCauley described a pattern of Altman withholding information from the board, including the decision to launch ChatGPT publicly, a failure to disclose potential conflicts of interest, and an incident where Altman misled a board member about another director’s intentions. The GPT-4 India deployment was also one of the events that led the board to briefly fire Altman in 2023. When OpenAI’s staff sided with Altman and Microsoft moved to restore him, the board reversed course.
I am extremely excited to welcome @dylanscand to OpenAI as our Head of Preparedness.
Things are about to move quite fast and we will be working with extremely powerful models soon. This will require commensurate safeguards to ensure we can continue to deliver tremendous…
— Sam Altman (@sama) February 3, 2026
OpenAI hired Dylan Scandinaro from Anthropic as its new Head of Preparedness in February. Altman said the hire would let him “sleep better tonight.” The company declined to comment on its current AGI alignment approach during the trial.
David Schizer, a former dean of Columbia Law School acting as Musk’s expert witness, said the core issue was process. “Part of that is taking safety rules seriously, if something needs to be subject to safety review, it needs to happen. What matters is the process issue.”
McCauley’s testimony raised a broader point beyond the trial: if AI safety governance at frontier labs ultimately comes down to one CEO making decisions, with the public good at stake, that is a structural problem that courtroom proceedings cannot fix. Her conclusion was an explicit call for government regulation of advanced AI development, a debate tracked on Relve, an AI trends intelligence platform.
The trial before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has since concluded with a unanimous jury verdict rejecting all of Musk’s claims on statute of limitations grounds. Altman, Brockman, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella all testified; Musk had sought $150 billion in damages and the removal of both Altman and Brockman from leadership.
