OpenAI Calls Musk's New Trial Demands a 'Legal Ambush' — Court Date Is April 27

OpenAI and Elon Musk go to trial on April 27. Two weeks out, Musk’s lawyers filed a sudden scope expansion that OpenAI is calling a “legal ambush” — and the new demands go well beyond money.

Musk has been suing OpenAI and Microsoft since 2024, claiming OpenAI abandoned its founding mission as a nonprofit research institution when it accepted billions in Microsoft investment and restructured as a for-profit entity. He told the court in January he was seeking somewhere between $79 billion and $134 billion in “wrongful gains.”

This week, his legal team rewrote the relief they’re asking for. Instead of claiming damages for himself, Musk now says any money the court awards should go back to OpenAI — not to him. That looks generous on the surface. The accompanying demands do not: Musk is asking the court to require Sam Altman and Greg Brockman’s removal from their leadership roles, unwind OpenAI’s corporate conversion, and impose ongoing court supervision over OpenAI’s financings and future transactions to ensure the company adheres to its original mission.

OpenAI’s response, filed late Friday, described the move as aimed at “sandbagging the defendants and injecting chaos into the proceedings, while trying to recast his public narrative about his lawsuit.” In short: OpenAI believes Musk is exploiting procedural timing to expand a trial that has been prepared around entirely different relief.

The odds that a court orders Altman removed from OpenAI are low. Judges routinely deny last-minute scope expansions, and there’s no established legal precedent for court-mandated CEO removal in a corporate mission dispute of this kind. But that’s almost beside the point.

OpenAI is currently preparing a U.S. IPO at a valuation approaching $1 trillion. A functioning, stable leadership team is central to that narrative. A trial that formally relitigates whether Sam Altman should run the company — even if Musk ultimately loses — creates noise that investors, regulators, and board members all have to weigh.

Musk runs xAI, a direct OpenAI competitor, and has made no secret of his position that OpenAI should revert to nonprofit governance. These latest demands are consistent with that position. Whether they’re a sincere legal strategy or a calculated disruption before a competitor’s IPO is a question the court won’t answer — but the market will.

The trial starts in San Francisco on April 27. Whatever the verdict, it will define how courts interpret the obligations of AI companies founded as nonprofits when they restructure for commercial scale.