Ilya Sutskever Testimony Exposes OpenAI Infighting and Concerns Over Sam Altman’s Leadership

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 with a mission to ensure artificial general intelligence, or AGI, benefits humanity. It established a for-profit arm in 2019 to raise the vast sums needed for model training and computing capacity. Co-founder Elon Musk later accused the company of abandoning its mission and sought $150 billion in damages from OpenAI and investor Microsoft, putting governance and commercialization at the center of the trial.

Former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever testified for about an hour in federal court in Oakland on May 11, 2026. He said he had spent about a year gathering evidence that Sam Altman was dishonest and had played senior executives against one another, and that he supported Altman’s removal in November 2023. Sutskever also disclosed that he held a 0.82% stake in the for-profit arm, worth about $7 billion at an $850 billion valuation. The Superalignment team he led was disbanded in May 2024.