Musk v. Altman trial reveals early OpenAI emails showing Musk drafted the lab's mission and governance structure, while Altman sought Y Combinator support and discussed funding commitments.

In June 2015, Altman proposed a five-part plan to Musk for an AI lab with a mission to 'create the first general AI and use it for individual empowerment,' with governance by five people including Altman, Musk, Bill Gates, Pierre Omidyar, and Dustin Moskovitz. Technology would be 'owned by the foundation and used for the good of the world,' with the five governing members deciding unclear cases.

By October 2015, Altman asked Musk for a $100 million commitment plus an additional $30 million over five years, and proposed a Safety Board starting with Musk and Altman as the first two members to serve as a 'second key' for releasing anything that could be dangerous.

In November 2015, Musk drafted the lab's core concept as an 'independent, pure play 501c3' focused on 'the positive advent of strong AI distributed widely to humanity,' proposed the name 'Freemind' to convey 'digital intelligence that will be freely available to all—the opposite of Deepmind's one-ring-to-rule-them-all approach,' and offered Tesla's sensor data, which he described as 'several orders of magnitude greater than any other company.'

The lawsuit accuses Altman, Brockman, and Microsoft of breaching OpenAI's charitable trust, fraud, and unjust enrichment, with Musk claiming OpenAI deviated from its founding mission to ensure artificial general intelligence (AI systems that equal or surpass human intelligence) benefits all of humanity.