Elon Musk has lost his attempt to neuter OpenAI. That’s probably a good thing for the entire artificial intelligence complex, including Musk’s own SpaceX. On Monday, a jury in the trial Musk kicked off against OpenAI in 2024 found that Musk had launched the legal action after the timeframe allowed by the law. The judge in the case concurred with that finding, which Musk said he would appeal. Elon Musk (right) lost his court battle against Sam Altman, head of ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI. Marija Ercegovac Musk had alleged that OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman “stole a charity” when they restructured the OpenAI into a for-profit entity last year. Musk was seeking up to $US150 billion ($210 billion) in damages, called for the reversion of OpenAI to a not-for-profit and wanted Altman and Brockman ejected from the company. Had he succeeded, it would have gutted OpenAI, cutting it off from the massive flows of funding required to train its models and acquire the chips and access to data centres that would enable it to remain in the frenetic scramble to develop ever-more sophisticated AI tools. Advertisement It would also have had significant, and threatening, implications for the rest of the sector, with OpenAI at the centre of the complex agreements and funding deals that the AI ecosystem has developed to raise the ever-increasing amounts of capital required to remain competitive. If OpenAI had lost the case and been removed from its pursuit of artificial general intelligence, or human-levels of artificial intelligence, it would have sent shockwaves – and massive losses – throughout the sector. If OpenAI had lost the case and been removed from its pursuit of artificial general intelligence, it would have sent shockwaves – and massive losses – throughout the sector. It would also have derailed OpenAI’s future funding capacity. OpenAI, which raised $US122 billion at a valuation of $US852 billion in March, has tentative plans for an initial public offering (IPO) later this year to raise another $US60 billion or more, at a share price that would value the business at $US1 trillion-plus later this year. Coincidentally or otherwise, Musk’s SpaceX will this week issue a public prospectus for a capital raising of its own, seeking to sell investors $US75 billion to $US80 billion worth of shares in an IPO that would value the company at $US1.75 trillion to $US2 trillion. That offering would have benefited had OpenAI been taken out of the race to develop AI and been withdrawn from the competition for funding. Advertisement In what shapes as a critical year for AI, given its insatiable appetite for capital, Anthropic is also mulling an IPO of its own. Related Article