OpenAI’s evolution reveals how governing transformative AI increasingly demands institutions beyond markets and governments alone. A lawsuit Elon Musk filed against OpenAI gave the public a rare glimpse into the company’s engine room; after weeks of testimony, the jury found against Mr. Musk on timing grounds, concluding that he had brought his claims too late. Mr. Musk’s claim was that OpenAI’s charitable mission had been captured by commercial restructuring, while OpenAI’s answer was that the mission could not survive without capital, infrastructure, products and scale. OpenAI launched in 2015 as a nonprofit AI research company whose goal was to advance digital intelligence for humanity as a whole, “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.” However, as frontier AI became a race for computational power, staying at the frontier required billions of dollars for cloud compute, talent and AI supercompute. OpenAI launched the first major mass-market large language model product, ChatGPT, faced the first globally visible governance crisis when its board fired and then reinstated its CEO, Sam Altman, and became the first frontier AI company whose founding mission was tested in court.