Hayden Field

The Microsoft CEO said that though things “started off as, essentially, a bunch of people leaving,” it turned into them “talking about creating a new company. That was obviously very concerning to me.” He said he was trying to make sure Altman and Greg Brockman joined Microsoft instead of launching a new competitor: “I just wanted to make sure we could hang onto the band that created all this technology, one way or the other.”

Zilis said she now recalled certain messages that she had said she didn’t recall in her deposition, saying that at this point she’d reviewed documents numerous times. Eddy said, “Your long-lost memories have since been recovered.”

A separate ideation email to Altman lays out certain options for changes to OpenAI’s structure, including one option of rolling all of OpenAI into a B-corp, or a for-profit company with a public mission, and another option of having both an OpenAI C-corp and a nonprofit.

The message, according to exhibits read aloud in court proceedings, said, “I just wanted to say I hope you are [OK]. I have no idea what’s going on but … I care about you as a person first and foremost. Sending all of my positive vibes your way.”

Altman and Brockman were both investors in the nuclear energy company, and since the company didn’t have an official product yet, she said that OpenAI potentially entering into a deal with Helion “felt super out of left field … How is it the case that we want to place [a] major bet on a speculative technology?”

She said she and the “entire board had voiced extreme concern about that whole massive thing happening without any semblance of board communication.” That was the first concern she raised internally about Altman, she said.

Shivon Zilis recalled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella saying of OpenAI at the time that Microsoft was “below them, above them, around them.” Zilis said this denoted complete control, calling it “terrifying because [it] was just not the thing that we had been fighting so hard for.”

She said he goes into “maniac mode” and had trouble thinking of a more quantifiable amount of hours. She added, as an answer to a follow-up question, that their time spent together was a brief break from “the insanity … that is his entire work life.”

The two companies’ famed 2019 contract was made public as part of the Musk v. Altman trial exhibits. The 36-page agreement defines artificial general intelligence as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.”