Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI has cleared a key procedural hurdle: a jury of nine has been seated. But here's the twist — whatever they decide, the judge gets the final word.
The jury was picked after five hours of questioning from a pool of 40 candidates. Their eventual verdict will be purely "advisory," meaning the presiding judge, Gonzalez Rogers, will make the ultimate liability determination. Sam Altman and Greg Brockman showed up in person for jury selection, an unusual move for top tech executives.
Potential jurors generally expressed negative or neutral views of both Musk and Altman. Musk's negative reputation largely stemmed from his work leading DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency) under the Trump administration. Only one candidate was excused for explicitly stating they couldn't be impartial toward Musk; all other bias challenges were denied. "The reality is people don't like him," Judge Gonzalez Rogers said, adding that many also dislike Altman, but praised the candidates for their fairness: "Everyone I questioned rose to the occasion." Each side used all five of their peremptory challenges.
The trial unfolds as OpenAI continues to roll out new models, recently launching GPT-5.5, which promises the same latency at half the cost. The company also released an update to Codex, its coding agent, that can now autonomously interact with browser UIs to find and fix bugs.
Outside the courthouse, about 25 protesters were targeting both Musk and Altman. The event was organized under the banner "Everyone Sucks Here."