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Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI

631 points · 623 comments · papergirl

papergirl · 1790490580 · focus · HN ↗
Newly released court filings quote an OpenAI researcher saying: “I was just worried about optics - i.e. 'openai uses copyrighted data from sketchy russian website’ showing up on HN would be unfortunate."
That's just one of several interesting quotes that have surfaced in documents from the Authors Guild's lawsuit against OpenAI.
1. swiftcoder · 1790497361 · focus · HN ↗
  It's good to know we all live rent-free in Dario Amodei's head
  1. optimalsolver · 1790497537 · focus · HN ↗
    You might be thinking of Demis Altman.
    lensecat · 1790498457 · focus · HN ↗
    Think they're referring to the following, when Amodei was still working for OpenAI:
    'OpenAI Feared “Optics,” Not the Law – “Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s then-Research Director, responded that ‘as a training set [LibGen is] a bit sketchier.’ [OpenAI researcher Sam] McCandlish explained: ‘I was just worried about optics – i.e. ‘openai uses copyrighted data from sketchy russian website’ showing up on [Hacker News] would be unfortunate.”'
    yorwba · 1790501557 · focus · HN ↗
    I was curious what he was responding to. Per <a href="https://authorsguild.org/app/uploads/2026/09/Class-Plaintiffs-SUF-9.17.26.pdf#page=56" rel="nofollow">https://authorsguild.org/app/uploads/2026/09/Class-Plaintiff... it was "On July 19, 2019, McCandlish wrote in an OpenAI Slack channel: “We’re not sure if we’re going to release the Foresight LM Scaling paper publicly, but if we do we were thinking about removing all mentions of LibGen, since it's a bit of a sketchy data source." The paper may or may not be <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361 where they write "we also test on similarly-prepared samples of Books Corpus [ZKZ+15], Common Crawl [Fou], English Wikipedia, and a collection of publicly-available Internet Books."
  2. gizajob · 1790499837 · focus · HN ↗
    Same as all the world’s copyright text lives rent-free in Claude and ChatGPT.
  3. MisterMunchkin · 1790503913 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    throwaway27448 · 1790506657 · focus · HN ↗
    Surely anthropic has a customer service channel you can use
    gizajob · 1790508326 · focus · HN ↗
    But Claude probably trawls HN so it’ll just tell him in its daily slop report.
    dgellow · 1790509062 · focus · HN ↗
    You’re jocking right?
    throwaway27448 · 1790509449 · focus · HN ↗
    I just want to keep this crap off public spaces; anyone who gives money to anthropic can deal with that relationship separately
    dgellow · 1790509722 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure but Anthropic customer support is infamous enough for being close to non existent
    throwaway27448 · 1790510586 · focus · HN ↗
    Caveat emptor; please don't drag that here.
    ssl-3 · 1790515417 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    NateEag · 1790521183 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe, if you don't like how the company treats its customers and craps all over the commons, you could not use their products.
    dgellow · 1790521275 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m not the person you should say that to, I already don’t use them. My previous comment was specifically about “report that to their customer support”. Anthropic doesn’t have actual customer support
    NateEag · 1790599019 · focus · HN ↗
    My apologies - I did not read the thread carefully enough.
    emdash · 1790522541 · focus · HN ↗
    They really don't
    throwaway27448 · 1790529332 · focus · HN ↗
    Ok, so the above user stop using it rather than whining on a public forum. It's pathetic.
    yard2010 · 1790525445 · focus · HN ↗
    You are absolutely right to push on this
  4. aenis · 1790522917 · focus · HN ↗
    That was the old Dario. He now has automations for that sort of thing.
2. aaron695 · 1790498026 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
3. locknitpicker · 1790498674 · focus · HN ↗
  > Newly released court filings quote an OpenAI researcher saying: “I was just worried about optics (...)"
  As a side-note, most orgs already cover the need to STFU in their training material for new hires, particularly how personal comments should not and cannot represent the company. I'm sure this lawsuit will be explicitly mentioned in upcoming versions of this sort training material in multiple orgs.
  1. wslack · 1790502880 · focus · HN ↗
    Legal incentives against better internal communication/coordination create so much inefficiency. The legal system should focus on outcomes more than internal comms.
    LPisGood · 1790524086 · focus · HN ↗
    Intent is very important for many practical purposes.
    shimman · 1790537283 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah and this is how they do that, intent matters and if this is the culture of the company then it makes it more heinous.
    intended · 1790596729 · focus · HN ↗
    I really doubt this is surprising to you.
    All checks cause friction. The trade off in velocity is when you get to see the shit hit the fan in someone else’s firm.
    Or for openAI, when the HN comments cover their daily work.
  2. lukewarm707 · 1790507637 · focus · HN ↗
    i am of the belief that papering over a fundamental lack of integrity and ethics will usually fail to conceal it. it is ineffective.
    lack of ethics and integrity is of course part of the design of a capitalist economy.
    you can't change the economy as an individual but i like this quote: "Do the right thing for the right reasons, at the right time with the right people, and you'll have no regrets for the rest of your lives."
4. classified · 1790511722 · focus · HN ↗
  That's not interesting, it's just dumb. OAI (among others) plundered the whole internet to steal their training data, what difference does a single website, however "sketchy" or not, make?
  1. beng-nl · 1790522167 · focus · HN ↗
    Because in context, the material obtained from that website is library genesis (libgen), a huge collection of (among other things) copyrighted books.

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