Alec Radford, a prominent researcher who played a pivotal role in the development of several key AI technologies at OpenAI, has been subpoenaed in a copyright lawsuit targeting the AI startup. This development was revealed in a court filing submitted on Tuesday.
The filing, presented by the plaintiffs’ attorney to the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, confirmed that Radford received the subpoena on February 25. Radford, who departed OpenAI late last year to focus on independent research, was the lead author of OpenAI’s influential research paper on generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs). These GPT models are the foundational technology behind some of OpenAI’s most popular products, including ChatGPT, the company’s widely-used AI-powered chatbot platform.
Radford’s tenure at OpenAI began in 2016, a year after the company’s establishment. During his time there, he made significant contributions to various models in the GPT series, as well as the speech recognition model, Whisper, and DALL-E, the company’s image-generating model.
The copyright case, titled “re OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation,” was initiated by a group of authors, including Paul Tremblay, Sarah Silverman, and Michael Chabon. They have accused OpenAI of infringing on their copyrights by using their literary works to train its AI models. Furthermore, the plaintiffs have claimed that ChatGPT has infringed upon their copyrighted content through the extensive quotation of their works without proper attribution.
In the previous year, the Court dismissed two of the plaintiffs’ claims against OpenAI but allowed the claim for direct infringement to proceed. OpenAI maintains that its use of copyrighted data falls under the principle of fair use and is therefore protected.
Radford is not the only high-profile figure that the authors’ legal team is seeking to involve. The plaintiffs’ lawyers have also moved to compel depositions from Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, both former OpenAI employees who left the company to found Anthropic. However, Amodei and Mann have contested these motions, citing excessive burden.
A U.S. magistrate judge recently ruled that Amodei must participate in several hours of questioning concerning his work at OpenAI, related to two copyright cases, including one filed by the Authors Guild.
