The riveting legal case currently being heard in the Ronald V Dellums courthouse in Oakland is nailing the lie that self-regulation of frontier AI is sufficient. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has accused OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman of mendaciously reneging on the AI lab’s founding agreement as a charity and unjustly enriching himself. Altman’s lawyers have countered that Musk, an early funder of OpenAI who later founded the rival xAI, is an unreliable witness because of memory lapses caused by his use of the drug “rhino ket.”
At times, the testimony has resembled the personal insults and grudges of a schoolyard scrap, even though the fate of multibillion-dollar businesses is at stake. But the case has also shone an unforgiving light on how two of the world’s best-funded frontier AI labs are run. Do we really want such win-at-all-cost billionaires in unconstrained charge of developing the most powerful technology of our times? No matter what their entrepreneurial talents, both Musk and Altman are in clear and desperate need of adult supervision.
Whether their companies’ boards or the US federal government are willing and able to provide such supervision is another question. Several tech titans may have bent the proverbial knee at President Donald Trump’s inauguration, suggesting they were subordinate to the White House. But their gesture was also a calculated trade: they played Trump when it came to AI regulation. In Trump’s second term “permissionless innovation” has been the administration’s mantra as the US races to outpace China. At present, more regulatory restrictions are imposed on nail salons than frontier AI companies.