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After a blockbuster few weeks in a California courtroom, OpenAI secured a major legal victory as a federal jury unanimously ruled that co-founder Elon Musk waited too long to file his lawsuit accusing the company of abandoning its nonprofit mission through its partnership with Microsoft.
The verdict was delivered on Monday after less than two hours of deliberation, as jurors sided with CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI, and president Greg Brockman. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers quickly backed the decision, telling Musk’s lawyers: “I think there’s a substantial amount of evidence to support the jury’s finding, which is why I was prepared to dismiss on the spot.”
The lawsuit had become one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched courtroom battles, with Musk arguing OpenAI had betrayed its founding promise to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity rather than private profit. He sought a swathe of remedies, including forcing the company to unwind parts of its corporate restructuring and remove executives from leadership.
But the case ultimately collapsed on procedural grounds.
Court’s Decision Against Musk ‘The Right Call’
Veteran anti-fraud attorney David Fleck argued in a post-trial analysis that the most important aspect of the case was Judge Gonzalez Rogers’ decision to use an “advisory jury” — a rarely used legal mechanism that Musk later criticized online.
Following the ruling, Musk called the judge “a terrible activist” and accused the court of handing OpenAI “a free license to loot charities.” Fleck disagreed, arguing the judge had actually given Musk an unusually generous procedural advantage.
“She could have decided the entire case herself,” Fleck wrote. “She chose not to.”
Under US law, jury trials are constitutionally guaranteed only for certain disputes involving monetary damages. Musk’s lawsuit, however, focused largely on equitable remedies, including claims involving charitable trust obligations and demands to unwind OpenAI’s restructuring, which are traditionally decided by judges alone.
This means Gonzalez Rogers was under no obligation to involve jurors at all.
Instead, she invoked Rule 39(c) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, allowing nine ordinary citizens to weigh in on the factual dispute at the heart of the case: whether Musk had waited too long to sue.
“The advisory jury, far from being a trick, was the most plaintiff-friendly procedural tool in the judge’s arsenal,” Fleck wrote.
Appellate courts are said to give greater deference to jury-backed factual findings than rulings made solely by judges. According to Fleck, the advisory jury effectively made the ruling more resilient to a possible appeal.
During testimony, Musk argued he only fully recognized OpenAI’s alleged misconduct in recent years. “Thinking that someone might steal your car is not the same as someone stealing it,” he told the court, explaining why he believed the statute of limitations should not apply earlier.
OpenAI’s lawyers countered with emails, internal communications, and evidence suggesting Musk had long understood the company’s commercial ambitions, including discussions dating back years about for-profit structures and outside investment.
Jurors appeared convinced.
After hearing three weeks of testimony involving some of the most recognizable figures in tech, the nine-person panel reached a unanimous verdict in roughly 90 minutes.
Fleck argued the outcome demonstrated the legal system functioning exactly as intended in a politically charged, high-stakes dispute involving one of the world’s richest men and one of the AI industry’s most valuable companies.
“Losing sucks,” Fleck wrote. “But this case was not lost because the judge was an activist. It was lost because nine ordinary residents of the East Bay, after sitting in that courtroom for three weeks, told her the plaintiff waited too long. And she agreed.”
Musk’s legal team is expected to appeal to the Ninth Circuit, which means that the battle over OpenAI’s structure and future is far from finished. As Dorothy Lund, a lawyer and law professor at Columbia Law School, told the BBC: “I don’t see him stopping…It seems like there is no one who has been able to put real consequences on him or his actions.”
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OpenAI Eyes IPO Days After Crushing Musk in Court
Hot on the heels of its courtroom victory over Musk, OpenAI may already be preparing for its next high-stakes showdown on Wall Street.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the AI giant could file confidentially for an IPO as early as this week, potentially setting the stage for one of the most closely watched public listings in tech history. The move would also intensify tensions between Altman and Musk, whose own empire increasingly overlaps with the company across AI, robotics, cloud infrastructure, and even space technology.
The timing is obviously hard to ignore.
If OpenAI does move forward, analysts believe the listing could rival or even surpass some of Silicon Valley’s biggest IPOs, with private market estimates already valuing the company at around $850 billion.
The IPO would also cement OpenAI’s shift from research lab to full-scale commercial juggernaut, which is the exact evolution Musk spent weeks attacking in court.
The public offering could create a direct rivalry between OpenAI and several Musk-controlled ventures, particularly SpaceX and xAI, as the race to dominate AI infrastructure accelerates. OpenAI is already expanding into cloud computing, enterprise software, and AI agents, while Musk has positioned xAI and Grok as ideological alternatives to Altman’s vision for artificial intelligence.
Even though the rivalry has become increasingly personal in recent months, Altman appears to have largely stayed focused on scaling the business.
An IPO would hand OpenAI access to enormous new pools of capital at a moment when AI companies are burning through billions to build data centers, train frontier models, and compete for engineering talent.
It would also mark one of the clearest signs yet that the AI boom is entering a new phase of becoming a fully-fledged corporate empire preparing to battle across public markets.
GitHub Becomes Latest Target in Escalating Developer Hack Campaign
GitHub revealed today that it is investigating “unauthorized access” to its internal repositories, after a hacking group known as TeamPCP reportedly claimed responsibility for the breach and began advertising stolen data for sale on a cybercrime forum.
In a statement posted to X, the Microsoft-owned platform said it currently has “no evidence of impact to customer information stored outside of GitHub’s internal repositories,” including customer organizations, enterprise accounts, or repositories. The company added that it is closely monitoring its systems for any follow-on activity.
The disclosure adds a dramatic new twist to a cyberattack campaign that has already rattled parts of the developer ecosystem in recent days.
Earlier this week, Grafana Labs confirmed hackers had gained access to its GitHub environment using a compromised token, allowing attackers to download parts of the company’s codebase and attempt to extort the firm with a ransomware demand.
Grafana said no customer data or personal information had been compromised and confirmed it would refuse to pay the ransom. The company also revoked the exposed credentials and implemented additional security protections following the incident.
While the Grafana breach was initially linked to the wider TanStack npm supply-chain attack, a report from BleepingComputer now suggests TeamPCP may be behind the more recent GitHub intrusion as well.
The group has reportedly claimed it accessed GitHub’s internal repositories and is attempting to sell the stolen data online, though the full scope of the breach remains unclear.
Grafana is just the latest in a list of organizations hit by recent supply-chain and developer-focused attacks, including OpenAI, which recently disclosed that two employee devices had also been compromised in a separate campaign tied to poisoned npm packages.
For now, GitHub says customer repositories and enterprise environments appear unaffected — but the investigation is still ongoing.
Google Wants Search to Know You Better Than You Know Yourself
Google is obsessed with AI. Just like many of the big tech companies, the behemoth announced an AI upgrade, this time turning Search into what it calls a more “personal” experience — because apparently the future of the internet is your search engine knowing you better than your closest friends.
At Google I/O 2026, the company announced further updates of its “Personal Intelligence” for AI Mode in Search, allowing Gemini-powered search results to pull information directly from services like Gmail and Google Photos to generate hyper-personalized answers.
This means Google’s AI could soon plan your family holiday using hotel confirmations buried in Gmail, recommend restaurants based on your old vacation photos, or suggest sneakers after noticing your recent shopping habits.
Google says the feature is opt-in and currently limited to AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the US. Still, the rollout is yet another step in the race to transform chatbots into full-time digital life assistants.
The company framed the update as Search becoming “uniquely yours,” with AI Mode increasingly designed to act less like a search engine and more like a proactive concierge quietly watching your digital life unfold in real time.
Google’s pitch is that AI Mode can now connect dots across your digital life that you probably forgot existed in the first place.
Naturally, privacy concerns immediately followed.
While Google insists users remain in control of connected apps and permissions, critics noted the announcement effectively formalizes a future where AI assistants continuously scan personal emails, photos, bookings, receipts, and browsing habits in exchange for convenience.
In other words, your inbox is now training itself to become your personality.
The update also underlines how aggressively Google is reshaping Search around AI as competition with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft intensifies. Executives described the overhaul as the “biggest upgrade” to Search in more than 25 years, with AI agents increasingly handling everything from shopping and travel planning to scheduling and research.
For users, the pitch is less searching, more asking.
For publishers, websites, and anyone still nostalgic for ten blue links, the future is looking increasingly… interpretive.
