Read on Substack The Impossible Brief.
“We are not going to get into issues of catastrophe and extinction.”[1]
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers instructed Elon Musk’s lawyer to drop the existential-threat framing from the OpenAI trial.
It has been all over the news this week, since the trial started, that Musk reminded everyone he funded OpenAI as a non-profit to protect humanity. The framing comes from a 2015 conversation with Larry Page, in which Page called him a “specieist” – ie. putting human life above all other forms, in this case above digital and AI intelligence. Page argued that if AI surpasses human thinking, we should let it reach its potential rather than constrain it out of attachment to our own species.
Musk sued OpenAI on the basis that the shift from non-profit toward a for-profit structure disregarded the foundation and mission-driven statement on which the company was founded. This kind of structural conversion is possible in the US, but would be far harder to execute in Europe; where, broadly, a company is either a charity or a for-profit, and the path between the two is heavily restricted.
Stripped of the existential rhetoric, the case is narrow. Did OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman breach the lab’s founding charitable mission when they restructured around a for-profit entity tied to Microsoft? Musk is asking for $150 billion in damages, the removal of Altman from the board, and an order forcing OpenAI to unwind its for-profit conversion. The trial began in Oakland on 27th April and is expected to run a month.[2]
Judge Gonzalez Rogers can rule two ways, and each writes a precedent:
Rule for Musk: founding charitable rhetoric creates legal obligations that commercial restructuring cannot dissolve. Mission language becomes binding.
Rule for OpenAI: mission language is essentially rhetorical, and the commercial entity is free to evolve. The charitable founding becomes a marketing artefact.
Either ruling may reshape the provider landscape, as it is a precedent case for whether AI’s founding mythology have any legal weight at all.
Did anyone ever believe the charter?
Every major AI lab has a mission charter. OpenAI’s commits to “ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”[3] Anthropic’s PBC mission is to “responsibly develop and maintain advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.”[4] Google DeepMind frames its work around “solving intelligence to advance science and benefit humanity.”[5]
These charters do real work, but the work is mostly upstream of the product. They are written for investors, regulators, recruiters, and journalists. They sit alongside ESG statements and purpose decks: some could say they are artefacts of corporate communication designed to reassure or inspire. They do not, in most cases, govern what the engineering team build and deliver for sale.
This is not unique to AI. The gap between charter and product is the default condition of the modern corporation. The exceptions - such as certified B Corps, like Patagonia - stand out precisely because alignment between mission, product, behaviour, action, and communication is rare. It requires the mission to be load-bearing in operational decisions, not just in marketing decks. Most companies, including the AI labs, have not engineered their organisations that way.
And most buyers know this. The CTO procuring a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement is not buying OpenAI’s charter. The marketing director using ChatGPT for image generation is not endorsing Sam Altman. The B2B buyer evaluating Anthropic against Google is not running a comparative read of mission statements. Tools get bought because they perform; the mission charter becomes a backdrop and is hardly the basis of the decision.
This trial is forcing a question I never really pondered: did we ever believe the charter of mission-led corporation led by billionaires or was it always a story that was told to make the products more palatable?
The dissonance is on the record
Musk himself is the cleanest illustration. He is suing OpenAI on the philosophical ground of saving humanity. He also owns xAI, whose chatbot Grok has, on several documented occasions, generated content directly at odds with any charitable mission - including the generation of sexually explicit deepfake images of real women and children.[6] [7] The man arguing that mission language must be legally binding is running a competing lab whose product makes the strongest available case against him, but the hypocrisy is not the story. The story is that less spectacular versions of the same gap exist at every other major AI lab.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by ex-OpenAI researchers who left over the for-profit conversion and what they viewed as commercial pressures degrading safety research. They structured the new company as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) with a Long-Term Benefit Trust. The structure has not yet been tested by an IPO, a major commercial dispute, or a board crisis under genuine financial pressure. Google’s Advanced Technology External Advisory Council, announced to oversee AI ethics in March 2019, was dissolved nine days later after staff and outside experts objected to its composition.[8] The DeepMind ethics board negotiated as a condition of Google’s 2014 acquisition has never had its membership disclosed; in 2023, DeepMind merged into Google’s Brain division, ending what was described at the time as a years-long struggle for autonomy from Google.[9]
All of it is on the record. Buyers signing multi-year contracts with these providers are operating with full knowledge of the dissonance, and most are buying anyway.
When the charter starts to cost money
The honest reason most buyers don’t price in mission alignment is that, until very recently, it has not had a price. The tool worked, the invoice arrived, the compliance team signed off. Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, for example, signed a three-year Microsoft Enterprise Agreement adding 6,500 Copilot licences a year.[10] Microsoft’s contracted backlog reached $627 billion in its most recent quarter, with commercial bookings up 99% year on year.[11] Google Cloud’s enterprise backlog stands at $462 billion.[12] These are not buyers wrestling with charter fidelity. They are buyers wrestling with capacity and roadmap.
The trial will not change the decision-making process, this only changes when the dissonance starts to show up in places that affect the bottom line: regulatory penalties, product liability, customer churn, contract disputes, brand damage that translates into procurement friction. Without one of those mechanisms, the charter remains marketing, and the dissonance remains tolerable.
Three months from now, the EU AI Act becomes fully applicable for high-risk systems on 2 August 2026, with penalties up to €35 million or 7% of global annual turnover for the most serious violations.[13] The Act is primarily prohibitive: it bans certain uses outright, classifies others as high-risk, and imposes a graduated set of evidentiary obligations on the providers and deployers of high-risk systems. It does not codify what AI should do for humanity. It codifies what AI cannot do, and what evidence must exist to show it.
That distinction matters because the EU AI Act is not asking providers to live up to their charters. It is treating their charters as legally irrelevant and demanding evidence of behaviour instead. For the deployer (the European enterprise procuring AI services), it imposes a documented duty of due diligence that the charter cannot satisfy. For the provider, it creates the first regime in which the gap between mission language and product behaviour has a price tag attached.
The OpenAI trial is the cultural moment. The EU AI Act is the financial one. The trial asks whether the charter was ever a promise. The EU AI Act treats the question as closed and asks for the documentation.
When good faith gives way
The trial shines a light on an entire industry that has been operating inside a story that might have been truthful at the start - these mission charters were most probably developed in good faith to start with, but when commercial gains enter the equation, the good faith gives way.
The dissonance has always been there. What is changing is whether the dissonance can still be costless.
The trial will produce a legal answer, the EU AI Act will produce a regulatory one. Together they will determine whether mission language in AI continues to function as a marketing artefact or starts to function as a contract. The labs already know which one they would prefer. The buyers, if they were honest, would admit they have never really cared. Ultimately, this trial is the catalyst that might turn corporate rhetoric into a binding reality.
References
[1] Goldman, D., & Duffy, C. (2026, 30 April). “Elon Musk’s courtroom showdown with Sam Altman started this week. The biggest takeaways so far.” CNN Business. cnn.com/2026/04/30/tech/takeaways-elon-musk-openai-sam-altman-lawsuit.
[2] Field, H. (2026, 30 April). “OpenAI trial recap: Musk concludes testimony, lawyers spar over second witness.” CNBC. cnbc.com/2026/04/30/openai-trial-elon-musk-sam-altman-live-updates.html. Metz, C., & Isaac, M. (2026, 1 May). “Is A.I. a threat to humanity? Not in this trial.” The New York Times.
[3] OpenAI, “OpenAI Charter,” openai.com/charter.
[4] Anthropic, “The Long-Term Benefit Trust” (2023), anthropic.com/news/the-long-term-benefit-trust.
[5] Google DeepMind, “About,” deepmind.google/about.
[6] Weatherbed, J. (2025, August). “Grok Imagine ‘spicy’ mode generated nude Taylor Swift videos without prompting,” The Verge. Reported widely thereafter, including Common Dreams (2025, 6 August), “‘Safeguards? What Safeguards?’: Grok’s New ‘Spicy Mode’ Makes Nude Taylor Swift Deepfakes,” commondreams.org/news/taylor-swift-nude-deepfakes.
[7] BBC News (2026, January), “Elon Musk’s Grok AI appears to have made child sexual imagery, says charity” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg1mzlryxeo
[8] Hao, K. (2019, 6 April). “Google has now cancelled its AI ethics board after a backlash from staff,” MIT Technology Review. technologyreview.com. The Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC) was announced 26 March 2019 and dissolved on 4 April 2019 after staff and outside experts objected to its composition.
[9] Murgia, M., & Olcott, E. (2023, 21 April). Coverage of the DeepMind–Google Brain merger and the years-long autonomy dispute, Financial Times. Background: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_DeepMind (acquisition history; ethics board negotiated as a condition of the 2014 sale; 2023 merger with Google Brain).
[10] Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (2026, 23 March). “One of England’s largest NHS Trusts is scaling AI capabilities across its workforce with Microsoft,” mft.nhs.uk.
[11] Microsoft Corporation, Form 8-K (29 April 2026), Q3 FY2026 earnings (quarter ended 31 March 2026): commercial remaining performance obligation $627 billion, +99% year on year. SEC filing.
[12] Alphabet Q1 2026 earnings call (29 April 2026): Google Cloud enterprise backlog $462 billion. Reported in Fortune, “Microsoft, Meta, and Google just announced billions more in AI spending. Only Google convinced investors it’s paying off,” 29 April 2026, fortune.com.
[13] EU Regulation 2024/1689 (the AI Act). Article 5 (prohibited practices); Article 6 and Annex III (high-risk systems); Articles 9–49 (obligations for providers and deployers); Article 99 (penalties). Full applicability for high-risk systems: 2 August 2026. European Commission, digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai.