Alec Radford, a researcher who worked on several key AI technologies at OpenAI, has been subpoenaed in a copyright case against the company. The US District Court in California confirmed that Radford was served a subpoena on February 25. As one of the lead authors of OpenAI’s seminal research paper on generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs), Radford played a crucial role in developing the AI-powered chatbot platform ChatGPT.
Radford joined OpenAI in 2016 and worked on several models, including GPTs, Whisper, and DALL-E. The copyright case, filed by book authors Paul Tremblay, Sarah Silverman, and Michael Chabon, alleges that OpenAI infringed their copyrights by using their work to train its AI models without proper attribution. Radford’s departure from OpenAI last year has made him a key witness in the case.
The court previously dismissed two of the plaintiffs’ claims against OpenAI but allowed one claim for direct infringement to proceed. OpenAI maintains that its use of copyrighted data is protected under fair use. The lawsuit also involves ex-OpenAI employees Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, who are being compelled to answer questions about their work at OpenAI in two separate copyright cases.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/04/key-ex-openai-researcher-subpoenaed-in-ai-copyright-case