Explosive new documents released last Thursday in Authors Guild v. OpenAI—the major book authors’ ongoing lawsuit alleging OpenAI and Microsoft illegally trained their products on copyrighted books—show that executives and employees at both companies intentionally broke the law and their disdain for human authorship. The brief meticulously documents AI developers’ knowledge of the damage their actions could do to authors, publishers, and American culture itself, warning that “OpenAI’s GPT models pose an existential threat to those who write and publish books.”
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include The Authors Guild, writers David Baldacci, Taylor Branch, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, Christopher Golden, Andrew Sean Greer, John Grisham, David Henry Hwang, Matthew Klam, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, Stacy Schiff, James Shapiro, and others.
Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger observed, “These filings reveal shocking disdain for writers and their work through repeated, intentional decisions to steal books rather than pay for them with full knowledge that their products will destroy the careers of authors. OpenAI pursued its mass piracy scheme even in the face of clear evidence that doing so would degrade American culture by substituting human works with AI slop and would put thousands of writers out of work.”
Key revelations from the authors’ brief:
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OpenAI and Microsoft Knew Their Systems Would Replace Human Writers – OpenAI Policy Director Jack Clark stated in May 2020: “Our work on AI and Creativity is going to increasingly lead to us creating systems that substitute for the labor of [] people … The better we do on GPT-X, the more worried genre fiction authors will become about us substituting for them on Amazon.” He then doubled down: “Our work in this area will make people unemployed… There will be a point where a bunch of artists express worry about what we’re doing here and we’ll likely ignore their concerns and release anyway …”
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“Autocompleting” Other People’s Work – OpenAI hired Tarun Gogineni in 2022 to lead its efforts to improve the writing quality of its models. Gogineni stated his “research mission” was to have GPT models write the “last two books of [Martin’s] A Song of Ice and Fire” series by “finishing it one day.” Gogineni even mused that he would “rest easy knowing that even if GRRM [George R. R. Martin] dies early, GPT-5 will autocomplete his series.”
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“Acceptable Economic Disruption.” – Gogineni was aware of authors’ complaints that the “datasets are stolen” and that authors were losing work to AI-generated competition, but he did not find those complaints “all that sympathetic” and instead viewed them as “acceptable economic disruption.” He wrote that the world would soon experience “the death of the reader” as “machines creat[ed] slop for more machines.”
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Microsoft Knew OpenAI Used Pirated Books from the Start – “Microsoft knew about OpenAI’s use of LibGen as early as April 2019 when Sam Altman and Dario Amodei presented an early version of GPT-3 to Bill Gates and disclosed the use of LibGen to Gates and Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott, among others.”
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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.”
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They Tried to Hide the Evidence – In an effort to cover its tracks the company called “Project Clear,” OpenAI deleted its LibGen files in the summer of 2022. On June 15, 2022, OpenAI VP of Research Bob McGrew wrote: “Given how much OpenAI is in the news, now is the right time to excise Libgen from our systems and storage. What would be involved in that?”
This briefing was filed in the class action case brought on behalf of the Authors Guild and book copyright owners, Alter v. OpenAI and Microsoft, with lead counsel Justin A. Nelson from Susman Godfrey. The case is part of multidistrict litigation against those defendants pending in Manhattan. A hearing is expected in early 2027.