Top AI companies, including OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, are increasingly being sued – Here are 8 key lawsuits to keep an eye on
Artificial intelligence companies are under growing scrutiny from major players in the technology and media industries, as concerns rise about the potential dangers of chatbots that could surpass human intelligence. Elon Musk recently filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company and its CEO, Sam Altman, of veering away from their original goal in favor of financial gain.
The lawsuit filed Thursday adds to a growing list of legal complaints filed against the ChatGPT maker in recent months. It has been sued by famous authors such as John Grisham and Jodi Picoult, journalists and news outlets including the New York Times. It also faces a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into whether it misled investors after it ousted Altman in November — before rehiring him.
Many complaints against AI companies such as OpenAI accuse them of violating copyright law and illegally skimming media companies’ data online. A win for the plaintiffs could mean AI companies would have to pay to use certain material to train their programs, said Justin Hughes, a professor at Loyola Law School who studies copyright law.
“Some people melodramatically say that copyright ‘threatens’ this new technology, or that copyright could stop generative AI. That’s completely false,” Hughes said. kills generative AI.”
Here are the top lawsuits to watch:
1. Elon Musk vs. Sam Altman, Gregory Brockman, OpenAI Inc.
Musk accuses the company he helped found of violating its charter by putting profits ahead of the benefit of humanity.
The startup was created as a non-profit organization and to screen out other AI projects, Musk’s lawyers said in the complaint. But they claim the startup has “turned into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the world’s largest technology company” contrary to its mission.
The CEO of Tesla Inc. and owner of X Corp., formerly Twitter, has said that general artificial intelligence poses an “existential threat.” Musk, the world’s richest person, resigned from OpenAI’s board in 2018 due to philosophical differences over the technology’s development.
2. The New York Times Co. v. Microsoft Corp.
The New York Times sued OpenAI and its biggest investor, Microsoft Corp., late last year, alleging that the startup illegally used millions of Times articles to build its AI tools.
The suit alleges that chatbots like ChatGPT “seek to exploit” the Times’ content and threaten to choke off its revenue. But the tech startup, which tried to dismiss some of the claims, fired back, accusing the Times of paying someone to hack its products and produce abnormal results to support its claims.
The lawsuit comes at a particularly dark time for the media — many news outlets have recently closed or laid off staff, and many are struggling to turn a profit due to declining advertising revenue.
3. Axel Springer, other media outlets sue Google
A group of more than 30 European media organizations sued Google in the Netherlands on Wednesday, demanding $2.3 billion and accusing the search giant’s advertising business of violating antitrust laws.
Media groups, including Politico owner Axel Springer, argue that the Alphabet Inc. unit’s “dominant” position in the ad market has cut into their revenue streams and caused them higher costs for ad technology services, according to the law. companies representing the plaintiffs.
4. Intercept Media Inc. v. OpenAI Inc. and Raw Story Media Inc. v. OpenAI Inc.
Raw Story Media Inc., The Intercept Media Inc. and AlterNet Media Inc. filed the lawsuit against OpenAI on Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan.
The news organizations allege that OpenAI and co-defendant Microsoft violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 by removing copyrighted information when they trained ChatGPT.
5. Basbanes v. Microsoft Corp.
In January, journalist Nicholas Gage and author Nicholas Basbanes filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging that the companies misused their work to train AI models.
Gage has written investigative stories for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Basbanes has written books on the history of publishing.
6. Sancton v. OpenAI Inc.
Journalist and nonfiction writer Julian Sancton sued OpenAI. The author of “Madhouse at the End of the Earth” claimed the company used his work without permission to train its generative AI tools. Sancton said that OpenAI and Microsoft completely ignored authors’ rights when developing models that support ChatGPT.
According to the November complaint, the training process “has hijacked the creators’ content with the intent of creating a machine built to produce the very content that authors would normally be paid to produce.”
7. Concord Music Group v. Anthropic PBC
A group of top music publishers, including Concord Music Group, sued artificial intelligence company Anthropic. The October complaint alleges that the Amazon-backed startup has used copyrighted lyrics from at least 500 songs and that its Claude AI chatbot is distributing them on its platform.
8. Authors Guild v. OpenAI LP
The Authors Guild of America filed a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI along with more than a dozen well-known authors, including Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin. Microsoft was later added as a defendant.
The organization claims that the company’s major language models are engaged in “systematic theft on a mass scale.” Earlier, more than 15,000 authors, including Margaret Atwood and Nora Roberts, had signed a letter calling on companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft and IBM to compensate authors for the use of their works.
