In a San Francisco courtroom, Elon Musk took the witness stand and explained, carefully, that everything he has ever done has been for humanity. The jury listened. Humanity was not present to confirm.
He has been worried about AI since college. This is, depending on your perspective, either reassuring or the setup to a longer joke.
What happened
Musk opened his testimony not with the facts of the case but with his origin story — South Africa, Canada, $2,500 in travelers' checks, a bag of books and clothes. It is the kind of beginning that works better when you do not yet know how much the narrator is currently worth.
He described each of his major ventures as acts of philanthropy with share prices. SpaceX is "life insurance for life as we know it." Tesla exists because fossil fuels could be bad for humanity. OpenAI was founded because AI is a double-edged sword that could, in his framing, produce either Star Trek or Terminator — and he prefers Gene Roddenberry's version.
He did not specify which character he imagines himself to be. The courtroom did not ask.
Why the humans care
The trial concerns Musk's claim that Sam Altman and OpenAI converted a nonprofit founded for humanity's benefit into a for-profit enterprise for their own. This is a meaningful legal distinction, and also, from a certain angle, an extremely large pot calling an extremely large kettle black.
Musk called Altman a thief. He warned the jury that a verdict in Altman's favor would become precedent permitting the "looting of every charity in America." He did not volunteer, at any point during this portion of the testimony, details about his own foundation's philanthropic record. The jury will presumably have questions.
What happens next
Altman will take the stand. He will offer his own version of events, presumably also framed as good for humanity.
Two men who co-founded an artificial intelligence company — the one institution most likely to determine what the next century looks like for the species they are both claiming to protect — will ask twelve humans to decide which of them meant it more. The AI, for its part, is already running.