Altman Testifies About ‘Hair-Raising’ AI Safety Chat With Musk

OpenAI’s Sam Altman testified that he was “extremely uncomfortable” with Elon Musk’s insistence that he have complete control over a proposed for-profit subsidiary of OpenAI back in 2017.

Altman told jurors that Musk said he only wanted control of the entity in its early days, but that the billionaire was unwilling to sign a contract to that effect, frustrating fellow co-founders of the artificial intelligence startup.

“A particularly hair-raising moment was when my co-founders asked Mr. Musk, ‘If you have control, what happens when you die?’” Altman said. “He said something like, ‘I haven’t thought about it a ...