Since Silverman's complaint, OpenAI has been hit with more than a dozen high-profile lawsuits and government investigations. Top authors, including Jodi Pickult, and media companies, including The New York Times, also claim that the company violates copyright law by training the algorithms that power popular services like ChatGPT with their work. are doing. Billionaire Elon Musk sued OpenAI for straying from his original nonprofit mission. Government agencies in the United States and Europe are also investigating whether the company violated competition, securities, and consumer protection laws in multiple regulatory investigations.
“Maybe it's a good thing that ChatGPT gets to be a lawyer because a lot of people are taking ChatGPT to court,” Silverman said in a November segment on Comedy Central's “The Daily Show.” Told.
Under siege, OpenAI is turning its attention to the world's top legal and political human thinking.it has Since March 2023, the company has hired about 20 in-house lawyers to work on issues such as copyright, according to a Washington Post analysis of LinkedIn. The company has posted a job opening for an antitrust lawyer with a salary of up to $300,000 to help deal with increased scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe over its partnership with Microsoft. It also employs some of the nation's top law firms, including Cooley Foerster and Morrison Foerster, to represent it in important cases.
OpenAI is in talks to hire Chris Lehane, a former press secretary for President Al Gore's campaign and architect of Airbnb's public policy efforts, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing the delicate negotiations. It is said that they are proceeding with this. OpenAI plans to lean heavily in the coming months on the idea that U.S. AI companies serve as a bulwark against China and support U.S. economic and national security interests. against increasingly aggressive foreign powers This is a strategy previously deployed by Facebook's parent company Meta to work more closely with President Trump.
As regulatory battles with cities across the country escalate, Lehane positioned Airbnb as supporting the aspirations of everyday entrepreneurs. In another sign of the maturation of OpenAI's political strategy, the company joined industry group TechNet this year.
The rapid expansion highlights the new reality that OpenAI is at war.
The company is defending itself amid a barrage of lawsuits, investigations and potential legislation that threatens its goal of building the world's most powerful AI. This is a dramatic change from just a year ago, when Washington state lawmakers were enamored with ChatGPT's potential and the political acumen of its CEO, Sam Altman.
“Everyone thinks of us as Big Tech,” said Choi Chang, OpenAI's general counsel. However, Chan insisted that the company is still far from startup mode, adding that it had only 200 employees in 2022.
OpenAI now has a total of about 1,000 employees, and the legal team is also adding to its rapid growth, he said. He jokes that ChatGPT has aged a few years in the months since its release, but says the increase in legal issues is “relatively proportional to the impact we've had on the world.”
“I relate to the fact that a lot of people say, ‘Look, I was just thinking about my job and this AI revolution happened,’” Chan said. “Naturally, there will be some negative opinions.”
This evolution is part of a Silicon Valley pattern in which companies initially celebrated for their technological achievements eventually face legal and political backlash due to the dangerous downsides of their products. become.
“Congratulations, you're now in the big leagues,” said Bradley Tusk, Uber's first political adviser and the startup's fixer in a heavily regulated industry. “They're the market leader in this completely revolutionary thing, which is very exciting, but also means it's going to be controversial for a very long time.”
But even in a rapidly changing technology world, OpenAI's evolution happened quickly. Other companies' products have been available for years or even decades before they came to the attention of regulators in Washington or legal challenges from celebrities and legacy companies. ChatGPT was released less than 18 months ago.
Apple's iPhone empire expanded with little interference for nearly 17 years, until last month when the Justice Department sued the company, accusing it of having an illegal mobile phone monopoly. Google was 22 years old when it filed its first landmark antitrust case in 2020. Even Facebook, which has a notoriously fraught relationship with Washington lawmakers, began operations on college campuses 13 years ago, tainted by the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the fallout from the 2016 election. Its reputation.
OpenAI has had mixed success in copyright litigation. Although the judge rejected many of the claims in Silverman's lawsuit, he acknowledged several key claims surrounding whether OpenAI copied the work of comedians and other writers. Mr. Silverman and his authors filed the complaint again last month.
As copyright litigation progresses, OpenAI is also embroiled in a lawsuit with co-founder and now competitor Musk. He sued the company earlier this year, accusing it of straying from its nonprofit mission. He requested a court order requiring OpenAI to follow “the long-standing practice of making AI research and technology developed at OpenAI available to the public,” rather than retaining it exclusively. I asked for
The corporate gloves are off. In response, OpenAI released old emails showing that Musk sought control of the startup and tried to merge it with his own car company, Tesla. In a court filing last week, OpenAI asked a judge to dismiss the billionaire's lawsuit, calling it “150 paragraphs of self-congratulation and historical revisionism.”
OpenAI is also at the center of several regulatory investigations, forcing the company to spend even more on legal support. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether investors were misled during the turbulent period during which Mr. Altman briefly retired. The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether it violated consumer protection laws in a number of areas, including data breaches and ChatGPT's inaccurate claims. The commission will also seek judicial guidance on which authorities should investigate the multibillion-dollar partnership with Microsoft, amid concerns that such deals are stifling competition in the rapidly evolving AI market. We have been consulting with the Ministry.
The company's head of international affairs, Anna Makanju, said in an interview with Washington Post Live that the increased regulatory scrutiny of the company means there are many ways governments can respond to the challenges posed by artificial intelligence. In a sense, he said, this should be a “reassurance” because it shows that the company already has a mechanism in place. .
“Because this technology is new, there is sometimes a feeling that we are completely unprepared and have no real way to control it,” she said. “There are a significant number of regulators who already have the power to take action against the harms caused by AI.”
Meanwhile, governments around the world are enacting laws to accommodate AI. Last month, the European Union passed an AI law that will put new guardrails on the technology in the coming years. Similar efforts have been delayed in the United States, but a bipartisan group of senators is expected to announce plans for AI legislation in the near future. Chang said he is optimistic that further guidance from policymakers could help resolve some of the legal issues currently facing the industry.
“This is the first culmination of a huge response,” he said. “It will never go away, but I think the initial shock and fear will subside a little.”
