ACCORDING to a March 4 court filing, ex-OpenAI researcher Alec Radford was served a subpoena over a copyright lawsuit. Radford helped develop key AI technologies at OpenAI.
The court filing was submitted to the United States District Court in the Northern District of California, and it mentioned that Alec Radford received a subpoena on February 25, 2025.
Alec Radford was one of the co-authors of OpenAI’s pioneering research paper, ‘Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training,’ which covered generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs). It is the technology that powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Alec Radford became a part of the AI startup in 2016, a year after it was founded. During his time at OpenAI, Radford worked on a speech recognition model along with various models in the GPT series. He also worked on OpenAI’s image-generation model, Whisper, and DALL-E. However, last year, Radford left OpenAI to conduct research independently.
The current copyright dispute, titled “re OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation,” was initiated by authors Michael Chabon, Sarah Silverman, and Paul Tremblay. The authors argue that OpenAI used their work to train its models, hence infringing their copyrights. They also alleged that OpenAI’s main product, ChatGPT, has been quoting and copying their work freely without proper credit to the authors.
Last year, the court rejected two of the authors’ complaints against OpenAI. However, one claim—that OpenAI directly copied their work without permission—was allowed to continue. OpenAI argues that using copyrighted materials to train its AI is legal under the concept of fair use, which permits certain uses of copyrighted content without needing explicit permission.
Ex-OpenAI team members Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann are also getting targeted
Radford isn’t the only well-known person the authors’ lawyers are targeting. They also want Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann—both former OpenAI employees who now run a company called Anthropic—to give sworn testimony about their work at OpenAI. However, Amodei and Mann are resisting this request.
Earlier this week, a U.S. magistrate judge ruled that Amodei must face (and answer) questions regarding his work at OpenAI in two separate copyright disputes. Authors Guild is behind one of these cases. Lawyers representing the Authors Guild argued that both Benjamin Mann and Amodei have “unique, firsthand knowledge of information highly relevant to this case.”
However, Mann and Amodei are trying to avoid the deposition. At the start of this year, Mann and Amodei’s lawyers said that Amodei “is not available for deposition.”
Mann’s lawyers added that Amodei has two young kids and a family member dealing with a serious medical condition. According to the emails, Amodei’s legal team told the Authors Guild that Mann would sit for a deposition only if they agreed not to depose Amodei.
***
This article was originally published on Cryptopolitan.com.