Thread

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.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.