One week into the Musk v. Altman lawsuit, the testimony has covered a lot of ground. OpenAI president Greg Brockman has appeared on the stand. Elon Musk's personal representative Jared Birchall has testified. Musk himself has taken questions. But one name keeps surfacing - belonging to someone who isn't in the courtroom at all: Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind.
Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010, sold it to Google for roughly $500 million in 2014, and now leads the research arm behind the Gemini model family. According to The Verge's coverage of the trial, his name appears repeatedly in testimony and evidence - not as a defendant or witness, but as a figure Musk was watching closely during OpenAI's early years.
The lawsuit centers on whether Sam Altman and others breached their obligations to OpenAI's original nonprofit mission by steering it toward a for-profit structure, and whether Musk was unlawfully pushed out in the process. ChatGPT and OpenAI's current valuation of roughly $300 billion are the backdrop that make those 2015 debates look small - at the time, everyone involved was guessing at what AI might become.
What the trial is producing, day by day, is a detailed record of Silicon Valley dynamics that rarely surfaces in public: emails about who trusted whom, internal debates about funding structures, and the personal relationships behind major decisions. The Hassabis thread - a rival Musk apparently thought about enough that his name keeps coming up under oath - is one piece of that portrait.
The legal outcome will matter for OpenAI's governance. The proceedings are already doing something else: making legible the human competition and calculation that shaped the current AI industry.