内容来源：https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/01/1136800/musk-v-altman-week-1-musk-says-he-was-duped-warns-ai-could-kill-us-all-and-admits-that-xai-distills-openais-models/

内容总结：

马斯克与奥特曼对簿公堂首周：自称遭欺骗、警告AI毁灭人类，承认xAI“蒸馏”OpenAI模型

在马斯克诉OpenAI这一里程碑式案件的首周庭审中，身穿笔挺黑色西装的马斯克出庭作证，指控OpenAI CEO萨姆·奥特曼及总裁格雷格·布罗克曼在合作初期欺骗其为公司注资。他警告称，人工智能可能毁灭全人类，并当庭承认自己旗下的人工智能公司xAI在训练聊天机器人Grok时，使用了OpenAI的模型技术，此言一出，法庭内一片哗然。

联邦法庭内座无虚席，律师团队手提成箱证据、记者们飞快敲击键盘，门外还有举着“退出ChatGPT”或“抵制特斯拉”标语的抗议者。马斯克表现得冷静自若，甚至不时用其独特的南非口音插科打诨，但也流露出悔意。“我就是个傻瓜，白白给他们资金创办了一家初创公司，”马斯克告诉陪审团。他回忆称，2015年与奥特曼和布罗克曼共同创立OpenAI时，他捐资3800万美元支持一家非营利组织开发有益于全人类的人工智能，而非让高管暴富。“他们用这笔钱造出了一个市值8000亿美元的公司。”

马斯克现请求法院罢免奥特曼和布罗克曼的职务，并撤销允许OpenAI运营营利性子公司的重组计划。此案的结果可能影响OpenAI冲击估值近万亿美元的IPO进程。与此同时，xAI预计最早将于今年6月作为马斯克旗下火箭公司SpaceX的一部分上市，目标估值高达1.75万亿美元。

为何起诉？——马斯克称要“拯救AI安全使命”

本周庭审的核心问题在于：马斯克为何起诉OpenAI？他辩称，自己是为恢复OpenAI最初的“非营利”结构，以保障AI的研发安全。而OpenAI的代理律师威廉·萨维特——曾代表马斯克及其特斯拉公司——针锋相对地指出，马斯克“从未真正致力于让OpenAI保持非营利”，他提起诉讼的真正目的是削弱竞争对手。

谁才是AI安全的守护者？

在陈述环节，马斯克将自己描绘成AI安全的长期倡导者。他声称创立OpenAI是为了制衡当时在AI领域领先的谷歌。他回忆，当问及谷歌联合创始人拉里·佩奇“如果AI试图消灭人类会怎样”时，对方回答：“只要人工智能能存活，那就没问题。”马斯克警告陪审团：“最坏的情况就是《终结者》那样的场景——AI杀死我们所有人。”

然而，萨维特律师犀利质询，指出xAI曾在今年4月起诉科罗拉多州一项旨在防止算法歧视的人工智能法律，暗示马斯克并非“安全与监管的卫士”。法官伊冯·罗杰斯也严肃地介入：“我不认为有太多人愿意把人类的未来交给马斯克先生。”

何时感觉自己被欺骗？

萨维特继续追问马斯克为何等到2024年才起诉，而非更早。马斯克将他对OpenAI的看法分为三个阶段：初期“热情支持”；中期“开始怀疑对方是否在说实话”；后期“确信他们在掠夺非营利组织”。他透露，转折点出现在2022年底，当他得知微软将向OpenAI投资100亿美元时，他发信息质问奥特曼：“这到底是怎么回事？这是偷梁换柱！”他认为，微软投这100亿美元，必定期望“巨大财务回报”，这违背了OpenAI的初衷。

起诉是为了扼杀竞争？

萨维特指控，马斯克起诉的真正目的是为了打压OpenAI，为其自身的科技帝国扫清障碍。他当庭展示了一封2017年的电子邮件，当时马斯克挖走了OpenAI创始成员卡帕西至特斯拉，并在邮件中写道：“OpenAI那帮人会想杀了我，但这事必须做。”马斯克则辩称：“这是自由世界，我不能限制他们从其他公司招人。”

萨维特还指出，特斯拉、SpaceX、Neuralink和X平台都是“为社会造福的营利性公司”，与OpenAI无异。他特别强调，xAI也是一家闭源的营利性公司，且其模型部分“蒸馏”了OpenAI的技术。面对质问，马斯克承认xAI确实“部分”使用了OpenAI模型进行蒸馏——一种让小型AI模仿大型模型行为以降低成本的技术。OpenAI此前曾指控中国AI公司深度求索采用类似做法，并对此一直持反对态度。但马斯克辩称：“利用其他AI来验证你的AI，这是标准做法。”

下周，加州大学伯克利分校的计算机科学家斯图尔特·罗素将就AI安全出庭作证，OpenAI总裁布罗克曼也将提供证词。

中文翻译：

马斯克诉奥特曼案第一周：马斯克称遭欺骗，警告人工智能或致人类灭绝，并承认xAI公司提炼了OpenAI的模型

马斯克保持冷静，而OpenAI的律师用尖锐问题质问他起诉该公司的动机。

在马斯克与OpenAI具有里程碑意义的审判第一周，马斯克身着笔挺的黑色西装系着领带出庭作证，主张OpenAI首席执行官山姆·奥特曼和总裁格雷格·布罗克曼欺骗他为该公司提供资金。在此过程中，他警告人工智能可能毁灭人类，并透露自己曾为旗下公司挖走OpenAI员工。他甚至承认——令法庭内一片哗然——自己的人工智能公司xAI（旗下拥有聊天机器人Grok）使用OpenAI的模型来训练自身。

位于加州奥克兰的联邦法院挤满了律师团队（手提装满证据的箱子）、用笔记本电脑飞速记录的记者，以及一批忧心忡忡的OpenAI员工。法院外，抗议者沿街举着标语，呼吁人们停用ChatGPT、抵制特斯拉，或两者兼之。马斯克看起来平静自如，不时用独特的南非口音插句俏皮话。但他也充满悔意。

“我是个傻瓜，白白给他们资金创办了一家初创公司。”马斯克对陪审团说。他声称自己在2015年与奥特曼和布罗克曼共同创立OpenAI时，是向一家为人类福祉开发人工智能的非营利组织捐款，而非为了让高管致富。“我给了他们约3800万美元的免费资金，他们用这些资金创立了如今价值8000亿美元的公司。”他说。

马斯克请求法院解除奥特曼和布罗克曼的职务，并撤销允许OpenAI运营营利性子公司的重组方案。审判结果可能颠覆OpenAI以近1万亿美元估值上市的进程。与此同时，xAI预计最早于6月作为马斯克火箭公司SpaceX的一部分上市，目标估值1.75万亿美元。

本周证词围绕审判核心问题展开：马斯克为何起诉OpenAI。马斯克辩称，他试图通过将公司恢复为原始非营利结构来拯救OpenAI安全开发人工智能的使命。OpenAI的律师威廉·萨维特——曾代表马斯克及其电动汽车公司特斯拉——反驳称，马斯克“从未致力于让OpenAI保持非营利性质”，而是通过诉讼打压竞争对手。

谁才是人工智能安全的守护者？

在周初的直接询问中，马斯克将自己塑造成长期倡导人工智能安全的角色。他说自己共同创立OpenAI是为了制衡当时领先人工智能竞赛的谷歌。他提到，当询问谷歌联合创始人拉里·佩奇如果人工智能试图消灭人类会怎样时，佩奇回答：“只要人工智能能存活，那也无妨。”

“最坏的情况是《终结者》那样的局面：人工智能杀死我们所有人。”马斯克后来对陪审团说。

萨维特站在讲台前辩称，马斯克并非“安全与监管的捍卫者”。在交叉询问中，他以犀利而精准的节奏指出，xAI于4月因科罗拉多州一项旨在防止算法歧视的人工智能法律起诉了该州。

马斯克的律师史蒂文·莫洛立刻起身反对，询问法官自己是否也能就ChatGPT的安全记录发表意见。

随后，双方律师就谁才是人工智能安全的真正守护者展开激烈辩论。

次日早晨，交锋仍在继续。“我们都可能因人工智能而死亡！”莫洛表示，暗示OpenAI不可信赖。

“尽管存在这些风险，你的客户正在创建一家完全处于这一领域的公司。”法官伊冯·冈萨雷斯·罗杰斯严厉地说，指向xAI。“我怀疑有很多人不想把人类的未来交到马斯克手中。”

当律师们开始互相抢话时，法官厉声道：“这不是审判人工智能是否对人类造成伤害的庭审。”

马斯克何时认为自己被欺骗？

萨维特继续交叉询问，强调马斯克从未致力于让OpenAI保持非营利性质，并声称他诉讼时间过晚，已超过诉讼时效。

马斯克解释为何在2024年而非更早起诉，描述了自己对OpenAI看法的“三个阶段”。第一阶段，他“热情支持”公司。第二阶段，“我开始对他们的诚实失去信心。”第三阶段，“我确定他们在掠夺非营利组织。”

2017年，马斯克与其他OpenAI联合创始人讨论创建营利性子公司，以筹集足够资金构建人工通用智能——一种能在大多数认知任务上与人类匹敌的强大人工智能。马斯克希望获得子公司多数股权，并有权选择多数董事会成员。他还提议让特斯拉收购OpenAI（他于2018年离开）。

“我不反对设立一个小型营利实体为非营利组织提供资金，”他对陪审团说，“只要不喧宾夺主。”

但马斯克作证称，直到2022年底，他才“对奥特曼失去信任”，怀疑其维持公司非营利性质的承诺。关键转折点是他得知微软将向OpenAI投资100亿美元。

“我给山姆·奥特曼发短信：‘到底怎么回事？这是挂羊头卖狗肉。’”他对陪审团说。微软愿意投资100亿美元，必然是期望“巨大的财务回报”。

马斯克是否只想打击竞争对手？

但萨维特辩称，马斯克起诉的真正目的是削弱OpenAI这一帝国科技企业的竞争对手。在担任OpenAI董事会成员期间，马斯克同时运营特斯拉和脑植入公司Neuralink。他于2023年创立xAI。

萨维特调出一封2017年马斯克发给特斯拉副总裁的邮件——此前他挖走OpenAI创始成员安德烈·卡帕斯至特斯拉工作。“OpenAI的家伙会想杀了我。但这是必须做的。”他写道。

面对质询，马斯克显得慌乱。他声称卡帕斯在被他招募至特斯拉前已决定离开OpenAI。“我相信这是个自由世界。”他说。

萨维特又调出一封2017年马斯克发给Neuralink联合创始人的邮件。他写道，他们可以“独立招聘或直接从OpenAI挖人”。追问之下，他声音疲惫：“这是个自由国家。我不能限制他们从其他公司招人。”

萨维特还指出，特斯拉、SpaceX、Neuralink和X（原推特）都是有益社会的营利公司，与OpenAI类似。他强调，xAI同样是闭源营利公司。

但马斯克声称xAI并非OpenAI的真正竞争对手。“我们目前并非最早实现人工通用智能的团队。”他对陪审团说。

事实上，马斯克承认xAI使用OpenAI技术。面对萨维特的无情追问，他说xAI“部分”提炼了OpenAI的模型，法庭内有人倒吸冷气。

提炼技术是指用较小的人工智能模型模仿更大、更先进模型的行为，从而以更低成本更快运行且性能相近。但OpenAI及其他人工智能公司对此表示反对。2025年2月，OpenAI指控中国人工智能公司DeepSeek提炼其模型。2025年8月，Wired报道称Anthropic因违反服务条款而屏蔽了OpenAI对Claude的访问权限——条款禁止逆向工程及构建竞争产品等行为。

“用其他人工智能验证自家人工智能是标准做法。”马斯克辩称。

下周，加州大学伯克利分校计算机科学家斯图尔特·罗素将就人工智能安全作证。在马斯克作证期间一直做笔记的布罗克曼也将出庭。

本文是《麻省理工科技评论》对马斯克诉奥特曼案持续报道的一部分。关注@techreview或@michelletomkim的X账号获取最新消息。

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英文来源：

Musk v. Altman week 1: Elon Musk says he was duped, warns AI could kill us all, and admits that xAI distills OpenAI’s models
Musk kept his cool, and OpenAI’s lawyer bulldozed him with piercing questions about his motivations for suing the company.
In the first week of the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, Musk took the stand in a crisp black suit and tie and argued that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had deceived him into bankrolling the company. Along the way, he warned that AI could destroy us all and sat through revelations that he had poached OpenAI employees for his own companies. He even confessed, to some audible gasps in the courtroom, that his own AI company, xAI, which makes the chatbot Grok, uses OpenAI’s models to train its own.
The federal courthouse in Oakland, California, was packed with armies of lawyers carrying boxes of exhibits, journalists typing away at their laptops, and a handful of concerned OpenAI employees. Outside, protesters lined the streets, carrying signs urging people to quit ChatGPT, boycott Tesla, or both. Musk looked calm and comfortable, slipping in the occasional quip in his distinct South African accent. But he also was full of remorse.
“I was a fool who provided them free funding to create a startup,” Musk told the jury. He said when he cofounded OpenAI in 2015 with Altman and Brockman, he was donating to a nonprofit developing AI for the benefit of humanity, not to make the executives rich. “I gave them $38 million of essentially free funding, which they then used to create what would become an $800 billion company,” he said.
Musk is asking the court to remove Altman and Brockman from their roles and to unwind the restructuring that allowed OpenAI to operate a for-profit subsidiary. The outcome of the trial could upend OpenAI’s race toward an IPO at a valuation approaching $1 trillion. Meanwhile, xAI is expected to go public as a part of Musk’s rocket company SpaceX as early as June, at a target valuation of $1.75 trillion.
This week’s testimony revolved around a central question of the trial: why Musk is suing OpenAI. Musk argued he was trying to save OpenAI’s mission to develop AI safely by restoring the company to its original nonprofit structure. OpenAI’s lawyer, William Savitt, who once represented Musk and his electric-car company Tesla, countered that Musk was “never committed to OpenAI being a nonprofit” and instead was suing to undermine his competitor.
Who is the steward of AI safety?
During his direct examination early in the week, Musk painted himself as a longtime advocate of AI safety. He said he cofounded OpenAI to create a “counterbalance to Google,” which was leading the AI race at the time. He said that when he asked Google cofounder Larry Page what happens if AI tries to wipe out humanity, Page told him, “That will be fine as long as artificial intelligence survives.”
“The worst-case scenario is a Terminator situation where AI kills us all,” Musk later told the jury.
Savitt stood at the lectern and argued that Musk was not a “paladin of safety and regulation.” As he cross-examined Musk in his sharp, surgical cadence, Savitt pointed out that xAI sued the state of Colorado in April over an AI law designed to prevent algorithmic discrimination.
Musk’s lawyer, Steven Molo, sprang to his feet to object. He asked the judge if he, too, could weigh in on ChatGPT’s safety record.
The lawyers then entered a heated debate about who was the true guardian of AI safety.
The sparring continued the next morning. “We all could die as a result of artificial intelligence!” said Molo, suggesting that OpenAI could not be trusted to build AI safely.
“Despite these risks, your client is creating a company that’s in the exact space,” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said sternly, referring to xAI. “I suspect there’s plenty of people who don’t want to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk’s hands.”
When the lawyers began talking over each other, the judge snapped. “This is not a trial on whether or not artificial intelligence has damaged humanity,” she said.
When did Musk think he was being duped?
As Savitt continued to cross-examine Musk, he pressed on the idea that Musk had never been committed to keeping OpenAI a nonprofit. He also claimed that Musk waited too long to sue OpenAI, filing after the statute of limitations ran out.
Musk explained why he sued in 2024 rather than earlier, describing “three phases” in his views of OpenAI. In phase one, he was “enthusiastically supportive” of the company.” In phase two, “I started to lose confidence that they were telling me the truth,” he said. In phase three, “I’m sure they’re looting the nonprofit.”
In 2017, Musk and other OpenAI cofounders discussed creating a for-profit subsidiary to raise enough capital to build artificial general intelligence—powerful AI that can compete with humans on most cognitive tasks. Musk wanted a majority interest in the subsidiary and the right to choose a majority of the board members. He also pitched having Tesla acquire OpenAI. (He left OpenAI in 2018.)
“I was not opposed to there being a small for-profit that provides funding to the nonprofit,” he told the jury, “as long as the tail didn’t wag the dog.”
But it was only in late 2022, Musk testified, that he “lost trust in Altman” and his commitment to keeping the company a nonprofit. The key moment came, he said, when he learned that Microsoft would invest $10 billion in OpenAI.
“I texted Sam Altman, ‘What the hell is going on? This is a bait and switch,’” he told the jury. Microsoft would give $10 billion only if it expected “a very big financial return,” he said.
Is Musk just trying to kill competition?
But Savitt argued that Musk was really suing to undermine OpenAI as a competitor to his empire of tech companies. While he was on the board of OpenAI, Musk was also running Tesla and his brain-implant company, Neuralink. He founded xAI in 2023.
Savitt pulled up an email that Musk had sent to a Tesla vice president in 2017 after hiring Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI, to work at Tesla.“The OpenAI guys are gonna want to kill me. But it had to be done,” he wrote.
When asked about it, Musk was flustered. He claimed Karpathy had already decided to leave OpenAI when he recruited him to work at Tesla. “I believe it’s a free world,” he said.
Savitt pulled up another email that Musk sent to a cofounder at Neuralink in 2017. He wrote that they could “hire independently or directly from OpenAI.” When pressed about it, he sounded frazzled. “It’s a free country,” he said. “I can’t restrict their ability to hire people from other companies.”
Savitt also pointed out that Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and X were socially beneficial for-profit companies, like OpenAI. He stressed that xAI was also a closed-source, for-profit company.
But Musk claimed that xAI was not a real competitor to OpenAI. “We’re not currently tracking to reach AGI first,” he told the jury.
In fact, Musk admitted that xAI uses OpenAI’s technology. In response to Savitt’s relentless questioning, he said xAI “partly” distills OpenAI’s models. Some people in the courtroom gasped.
Distillation is a technique where a smaller AI model is trained to mimic the behavior of larger, more capable models, so it can run faster and more cheaply while performing nearly as well. But OpenAI and other AI companies have pushed back against the practice. In February, OpenAI accused the Chinese AI company DeepSeek of distilling its AI models. In August 2025, Wired reported that Anthropic had blocked OpenAI’s access to Claude for violating the company’s terms of service, which prohibit, among other things, reverse-engineering its services and building competing products.
“It is standard practice to use other AIs to validate your AI,” argued Musk.
Next week, Stuart Russell, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley, will testify about AI safety. Brockman, who has been taking notes during Musk’s testimony, will also testify.
This story is part of MIT Technology Review’s ongoing coverage of the Musk v. Altman trial. Follow @techreview or @michelletomkim on X for up-to-the-minute reporting.
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Artificial intelligence
OpenAI is throwing everything into building a fully automated researcher
An exclusive conversation with OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, about his firm's new grand challenge and the future of AI.
How Pokémon Go is giving delivery robots an inch-perfect view of the world
Exclusive: Niantic's AI spinout is training a new world model using 30 billion images of urban landmarks crowdsourced from players.
Want to understand the current state of AI? Check out these charts.
According to Stanford’s 2026 AI Index, AI is sprinting, and we’re struggling to keep up.
This startup wants to change how mathematicians do math
Axiom Math is giving away a powerful new AI tool. But it remains to be seen if it speeds up research as much as the company hopes.
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