Alec Radford leaves OpenAI and now he’s being pulled into a lawsuit

Alec Radford, a former key researcher at OpenAI, has been subpoenaed in a copyright case against the AI startup, according to a court filing submitted on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Radford received the subpoena on February 25, according to a report from TechCrunch.

Radford left OpenAI late last year to pursue independent research. He is recognized as the lead author of OpenAI’s foundational research paper on generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs), which are integral to many of OpenAI’s popular products, including the chatbot platform ChatGPT.

Since joining OpenAI in 2016, Radford contributed to several models in the GPT series, as well as other projects such as the speech recognition model Whisper and the image-generating model DALL-E.

The lawsuit, referred to as the “re OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation,” was initiated by authors Paul Tremblay, Sarah Silverman, and Michael Chabon. They claim that OpenAI violated their copyrights by utilizing their work to train its AI models and that ChatGPT infringed upon their works by quoting them without proper attribution.

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While the court dismissed two claims against OpenAI last year, it allowed the direct infringement claim to proceed. OpenAI asserts that its use of copyrighted data for training falls under fair use protections.

Radford is not the sole ex-OpenAI employee targeted in this case. Plaintiffs’ attorneys have also sought to compel the depositions of Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, both former OpenAI employees who co-founded Anthropic. They have challenged the motions, citing them as overly burdensome.

This week, a U.S. magistrate judge ruled that Amodei must undergo extensive questioning regarding his work at OpenAI in connection with two copyright cases, including one filed by the Authors Guild.

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