Alec Radford, a former OpenAI researcher known for his contributions to key AI technologies, has been subpoenaed in a copyright lawsuit against the AI company, according to a court filing submitted on Tuesday. The subpoena was served to Radford on February 25, as part of the case filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Radford, who left OpenAI late last year to focus on independent research, played a leading role in developing OpenAI’s groundbreaking generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs), which are the foundation of products like ChatGPT. He joined the company in 2016 and worked on various AI models, including GPT, Whisper (a speech recognition model), and DALL-E, which generates images.
The lawsuit, titled “re OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation,” involves book authors such as Paul Tremblay, Sarah Silverman, and Michael Chabon. They claim that OpenAI used their copyrighted works without permission to train its AI models and that ChatGPT quoted their works without proper attribution. Although a court dismissed some of the plaintiffs’ claims last year, it allowed the direct infringement claim to proceed. OpenAI defends its use of copyrighted material, citing fair use.
Radford isn’t the only former OpenAI figure being targeted by the plaintiffs’ legal team. Lawyers are also seeking to compel testimony from Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, former OpenAI employees who later co-founded Anthropic. Both Amodei and Mann have resisted the subpoenas, arguing that they are overly demanding. Recently, a U.S. magistrate judge ruled that Amodei must testify about his work at OpenAI in connection with two copyright cases, including one filed by the Authors Guild.
