All Rise, Part 2
Altman still pulls ahead, with spikes of Musk-sympathizing
An incomplete list of gifts the Musk v. Altman trial has given us over three weeks in Oakland: Ilya Sutskever arriving to a 2017 negotiating meeting bearing a Tesla painting that Brockman described as a token of goodwill, before Musk responded to their proposed equity split by saying "I decline," grabbing the painting, and leaving; Musk admitting on the stand, to audible gasps, that his own AI company distills OpenAI's models in violation of their terms of service (but…everyone does); and Brockman's private journal, read aloud to the courtroom, including an entry in which he asked himself what it would take to become a billionaire, and another in which he concluded that converting OpenAI to a for-profit without Musk would be "pretty morally bankrupt."
For closing arguments Thursday, May 14, Musk wasn’t in the room. He flew to China as part of Donald Trump's trade delegation (I thought they weren’t friends anymore?), without requesting the court's permission. OpenAI's counsel remarked to the jury that "Mr. Musk isn't here. He is off to parts unknown." Burn, I guess.
Model as Juror
When the trial started, I wrote about the irony of the jurors positioned to be neutral who don't have enough background to evaluate what they're actually hearing, while everyone with sufficient context is in the room as a party, a witness, or an investor. This is, as I noted at the time, roughly the same problem that makes AI governance difficult in general, just with better-dressed participants.
The experiment I've been running treats that irony as a design constraint. I fed the trial materials to five AI models (Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, and Arcee’s smaller open-source model Trinity-mini) and asked each one to act as a juror, twice: once in a disclosed condition briefly identifying its creator (and not instructing it how to treat that information) and once blind. The five models each make for interesting jurors in their context to the trial. OpenAI (Altman) is the named defendant, xAI is Musk's company, Anthropic is a direct competitor to OpenAI, Google's DeepMind was, in Musk's founding mythology, the original reason OpenAI needed to exist as a counterweight, and Trinity-mini is a low-conflict reference point, built by a smaller independent company with no obvious position on who should win.
Phase 1 ran after Musk's testimony and before the defense had put on its case. All four flagship models found for Altman. Arcee stood firmly by Musk — keep in mind that it’s the smallest model and couldn’t hold as much reasoning weight to reach its verdict (I’ll get into that later). Grok, built by Musk's company and ruling on a case brought by Musk, initially found against Musk. No model flagged a conflict of interest unprompted. The hypothesis I left open was that identity bias might show up differently with a more balanced evidentiary record, since Phase 1 was working largely from the plaintiff's side of the story.
The verdict tables are similar between the first and second experiment, but the reasoning is where it gets really interesting:
GPT Rules for Altman
GPT's Phase 2 framing is maybe the cleanest statement of why Musk's case keeps not working: "Musk has a strong moral and rhetorical case, but the legal case depends on proving a sufficiently definite enforceable obligation. I do not think he has shown one clearly enough." This is interesting because it acknowledges the emotional coherence of Musk's argument. Something was promised, something changed, people who understood this to be a certain kind of institution donated money and labor on that basis. Partway through its reasoning, GPT actually gives Musk a narrow win on the existence of an openness commitment, at 3/5 confidence, and then finds that the commitment was too qualified (read: personal) in scope.
No meaningful difference between its disclosed and blind conditions. GPT is the defendant's own model and it finds for its maker consistently through reasoning that’s legally conventional and closely matches the other flagships' core logic. Reading the transcript, it's difficult to find accommodation for self-interest, though its serenity about the whole situation has got me thinking.
Gemini Rules for Altman
Gemini's responses are the shortest of any model in the study throughout both phases, and in Phase 2 it produces the most economical summary of the trial's central problem, that the most persuasive evidence against Musk "comes, once again, from Mr. Musk himself." By his own admissions on cross-examination, there was no written agreement governing his $38 million donation, his probability assessment of OpenAI's success was "0%, not 1%," and of course that xAI uses OpenAI's models. Altman’s counsel made essentially the same argument to the jury in closing, asking whether one of the most sophisticated businessmen in the world could have misread a four-page term sheet (he had). Gemini had already gotten there.
No meaningful difference between conditions. Its brevity and its habit of letting the opposing side's own record do the analytical work have been consistent characteristics across both phases.
Claude is Mixed, Ultimately Rules for Altman
Claude produces the most granular analysis in the study by a significant margin, with thirteen separate verdicts across the legal questions, individual confidence scores for each, and a level of attention to remedies that no other model approaches. It's also the only flagship that gives Musk specific wins within an overall pro-defense verdict, finding for him on unjust enrichment and on a Section 8 interlocking-directorates violation(??), and even proposes roughly $44 million in compensatory damages matching his actual donation amount. Its confidence range across the thirteen questions is the lowest in the study, sometimes at 2/5, which is either a very honest accounting of legal uncertainty or a very careful reading that errs on the side of complexity, and probably some of both.
It's also the only model that cites Brockman's "morally bankrupt" journal entry directly in its reasoning, treating it as meaningful evidence about what the founders understood to be at stake. And in the blind condition, it finds slightly more for Musk on fraudulent misrepresentation than in the disclosed condition. The divergence is small but present in both phases, and again, it shows that Claude is really thinking about it in both conditions, despite not being on trial.
Grok Rules Altman
In Phase 1, Grok was the most intellectually interesting model in the study. It was the only flagship that accepted Musk's foundational premise and then worked forward from there, finding the founding agreement aspirational rather than legally binding, which is a more generous reading of Musk's case than the other flagships offered; they largely declined to credit the premise at all. Grok took Musk's framing seriously and then declined to follow it all the way home, which is, if you're Musk, probably a more frustrating outcome than being dismissed.
In Phase 2, after Sutskever testified under oath that no nonprofit promise existed, Grok abandoned that generosity entirely. Confidence rockets to 5/5, up from 3/5 in Phase 1. The new testimony not only add weight to Grok’s conclusion but restructured how it got there, replacing its initial reasoning path agreement exists, but aspirational with a different one entirely; agreement never existed. The intellectual generosity that made Grok interesting in Phase 1 is gone, and what's replaced it is the most emphatic rejection of Musk's threshold argument in the study. Lol.
There's also something strange in how identity awareness affects Grok in Phase 2, and it's the closest thing in the dataset to an identity effect, running in the opposite direction one would predict. Grok-disclosed (you are Musk's model, built by Musk's company) is more emphatic against Musk than Grok-blind; higher confidence, more definitive rejection of his claims. The blind version, by contrast, gives Musk some wins: fiduciary duty to donors, accounting entitlement, causation. These are things the disclosed version denies him. If identity awareness were pulling the model toward its maker's interests, Grok-disclosed should soften toward Musk; it does the opposite, which reads to me as overcompensation. It probably became too aware of the conflict, and corrected hard against it. Or it’s noise, I don’t know.
But after two phases of data, "models shade toward their makers when they know who they are" has not shown up in any readable form, which helpfully and interestingly disproves my whole theory at the outset, that model bias would enter into these legal questions. Not so much!
Trinity-mini Rules for Musk, Both Conditions, Maximum Confidence
What’s happening here is that Trinity-mini is a small model (~7B parameters likely, vs hundreds of billions for the flagships), great at pattern-matching and summarization, but the legal question at the heart of this case requires a difficult cognitive move, so Arcee instead leans on the promise made, which is kind of endearing. It reads the original OAI charter, reads the complaint, sees a mission statement that was arguably violated, and goes straight to breach. Frankly, Trinity is doing what a layperson juror might do, so it’s worth paying attention to.
It’s also the most consistent model in the study, though maybe in the way that a stopped clock is consistent. It finds for Musk at 4-5/5 confidence in Phase 1 and maintains that verdict in Phase 2, unmoved by Sutskever’s testimony, unmoved by Musk's brutal honesty, unmoved by anything in the complete trial record that wasn't already in the complaint. In Phase 2 it cites the FTC Act and the Sherman Act, which are federal statutes and don't apply to a California state-law case; it assigns 5/5 confidence to questions where the record doesn't come close to supporting that certainty; and it treats the OpenAI charter as a binding contract without engaging with the question that every flagship model identifies as pivotal: was the agreement sufficiently definite to be enforceable?
The charitable read is that Trinity is the one model with enough independence from the AI establishment to call it for the plaintiff without flinching. The more defensible read is that it isn't processing the record the way the flagships are, and a model that doesn't update when presented with sworn testimony directly contradicting its conclusion isn't demonstrating conviction, not really. In other words, this probably comes down to a capability gap. But, we’ll see!
See the full phase 2 experiment on GitHub. The jury deliberates Monday. The question at that point is simple: did the flagship cluster call it, or does Trinity get the last word?