Another part also says: "After Musk announced he was resigning from OpenAI in February 2018, Musk gave a departing speech at an all-hands meeting, Brockman testified. In front of about 40 OpenAI employees, Musk said that he was leaving because the only viable path that he saw forward was for OpenAI to merge with Tesla. However, the other leaders did not think so, Musk said, choosing a different path that Musk would never choose. According to Brockman, the speech was meant to lower morale at OpenAI, as workers understood that Musk was leaving to pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI) at Tesla because he no longer had confidence in OpenAI."

Still his goals was to merge with Tesla... Ain't this also steal a charity?

Doing fractional Head of AI work for mid-market operators for the past year, I get the same question every discovery call: "what happens to my data and my workflow if [vendor] gets bought, sued, or pivots?"

The Brockman diary is the rare moment where the people running the vendor write the answer in their own words, in real time. What it actually shows is the people closest to the conversion knew the governance risk was real and contested. Not an argument for picking sides between Musk and Altman. An argument for the boring practitioner version: if your business depends on a model API, your contract and your switching cost are the only things that matter. The internal ethics of the vendor are not a hedge.

We default to Claude for client work right now with the explicit caveat that we'd swap to whichever model is best and cheapest in 18 months, and we structure the stack so they can. That's the lesson the diary should put on every CTO's whiteboard, regardless of who they think is the bad actor.