Elon Musk, who sued OpenAI for violating its non-profit mission and chasing profits, allegedly wanted the organization to merge with Tesla when it was starting to plan its transition into a for-profit entity in order to accomplish its goals. Well, either that or get full control of the company, OpenAI said in a blog post. The organization responded to Musk's lawsuit by publishing old emails from 2015 to 2018 when he was still involved in its operations. 

When OpenAI introduced itself to the world back in 2015, it announced that it had $1 billion in funding. Apparently, Musk was the one who suggested that figure, even though OpenAI had raised less than $45 million from him and around $90 million from other donors. "We need to go with a much bigger number than $100M to avoid sounding hopeless... I think we should say that we are starting with a $1B funding commitment... I will cover whatever anyone else doesn't provide," he wrote, according to the company. 

In 2017, OpenAI's leaders realized that they truly did need a lot more money — billions of dollars — because artificial intelligence required vast quantities of computing power. That's when they started discussing its transition into a for-profit structure. OpenAI said Musk was involved in the planning and originally wanted majority equity, control of the initial board of directors and the CEO position. However, the organization felt that it was against its mission to give one person absolute control over it. They couldn't get to an agreement, and Musk reportedly withheld funding while talks were ongoing.

Musk then forwarded an email to OpenAI in 2018, which suggested attaching the organization to Tesla so that the automaker could provide its funding. He explained in his letter that he believed it was "the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google." OpenAI didn't say how their discussions progressed after that, but Musk's idea obviously didn't push through, and he soon left the company. In the last email from Musk that the organization posted, he said his "probability assessment of OpenAI being relevant to DeepMind/Google without a dramatic change in execution and resources is 0%." 

In his lawsuit, Musk accused OpenAI of being a "closed-source de facto subsidiary" of Microsoft, which uses its AI technology for products like Bing after investing $13 billion into the company. "Microsoft stands to make a fortune selling GPT-4 to the public, which would not be possible if OpenAI — as it is required to do — makes the technology freely available to the public," the lawsuit argued. OpenAI said Musk was aware its mission did not imply open sourcing its artificial intelligence technology, though. It released an email in which Ilya Sutskever, its co-founder and chief scientist, told Musk: "As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in OpenAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it's totally OK to not share the science." Musk then responded with "Yup."

"We're sad that it's come to this with someone whom we've deeply admired — someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI's mission without him," the company wrote in its post. After Musk filed his lawsuit, the company sent internal memos to its staff denying his allegations. Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon said in one memo that Musk's claims "may stem from [his] regrets about not being involved with the company today." Sam Altman said in another memo that he misses the person he knew who competed with others by building better technology. He also responded to a five-year old tweet from Musk thanking him for defending Tesla.

Musk's lawsuit accuses OpenAI of breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and unfair competition. He is currently seeking a jury trial and wants the court to order OpenAI to follow its "longstanding practice of making AI research and technology" available to the public, as well as to prohibit it from using its technology for the financial benefit of Microsoft and any other particular organization or individual. Musk has yet to respond to OpenAI's post.

Microsoft has filed a motion seeking to dismiss key parts of a lawsuit The New York Times filed against the company and Open AI, accusing them of copyright infringement. If you'll recall, The Times sued both companies for using its published articles to train their GPT large language models (LLMs) without permission and compensation. In its filing, the company has accused The Times of pushing "doomsday futurology" by claiming that AI technologies pose a threat to independent journalism. It follows OpenAI's court filing from late February that's also seeking to dismiss some important elements on the case. 

Like OpenAI before it, Microsoft accused The Times of crafting "unrealistic prompts" in an effort to "coax the GPT-based tools" to spit out responses matching its content. It also compared the media organization's lawsuit to Hollywood studios' efforts to " stop a groundbreaking new technology:" The VCR. Instead of destroying Hollywood, Microsoft explained, the VCR helped the entertainment industry flourish by opening up revenue streams. LLMs are a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, it continued, and Microsoft collaborated with OpenAI to "help bring their extraordinary power to the public" because it "firmly believes in LLMs' capacity to improve the way people live and work."

The company is asking the court to dismiss three claims, including one saying it's liable for end-user copyright infringement through the use of GPT-based tools and another that says it violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Microsoft also wants the court to dismiss the element of the case wherein The Times accused it of misappropriating time-sensitive breaking news and consumer purchasing recommendations. As an example, The Times argued in its lawsuit that it will lose revenue if users ask ChatGPT to research articles on Wirecutter, which the news company owns, because potential buyers will no longer click on its referral links. But that's "mere speculation about what The Times apparently fears might happen," and it didn't give a single real-world example in its complaint, Microsoft said.

"Microsoft doesn't dispute that it worked with OpenAI to copy millions of The Times's works without its permission to build its tools," Ian Crosby, lead counsel for The Times, told the publication." Instead, it oddly compares L.L.M.s to the VCR even though VCR makers never argued that it was necessary to engage in massive copyright infringement to build their products."

OpenAI and Microsoft are facing more lawsuits related to the content used to train the former's LLMs other than this particular one. Nonfiction writers and fiction authors, including Michael Chabon, George R.R. Martin, John Grisham and Jodi Picoult, accused the companies of stealing their work for AI training. More recently, The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet filed separate lawsuits against the company, because ChatGPT allegedly reproduces their content "verbatim or nearly verbatim" while removing proper attribution. 

A group of former Twitter executives, including former CEO Parag Agrawal, are suing Elon Musk and X over millions of dollars in unpaid severance benefits. The claims date back to the chaotic circumstances surrounding Musk’s takeover of the company in October 2022.

When Musk took control of the company, his first move was to fire Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde and general counsel Sean Edgett. According to the lawsuit, Musk had “special ire” for the group because of the role they played in the months-long court battle that forced Musk to follow through with the acquisition after he attempted to back out of the deal. According to the lawsuit, Agrawal is entitled to $57.4 million in severance benefits, Segal is entitled to $44.5 million, Gadde $20 million and Edgett $6.8 million, for a total of about $128 million.

The lawsuit cites Musk biographer Walter Isaacson’s account of the events, which explains that Musk rushed to close the Twitter deal a day early so he could fire the executives “for cause” just before their final stock options were set to vest. According to Isaacson, Musk bragged that the legal maneuver saved him about $200 million. 

“Musk doesn’t pay his bills, believes the rules don’t apply to him, and uses his wealth and power to run roughshod over anyone who disagrees with him,” the lawsuit states,“Because Musk decided he didn’t want to pay Plaintiffs’ severance benefits, he simply fired them without reason, then made up fake cause and appointed employees of his various companies to uphold his decision.”

X didn’t respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. Of note, it’s not the first time former Twitter employees have sued the company for failing to pay severance benefits. A separate lawsuit claimed Twitter owed former workers more than $500 million in unpaid severance. Agrawal, Segal and Gadde also previously sued the company over unpaid legal bills as a result of shareholder lawsuits and other investigations that resulted from Musk’s takeover,

Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts Air National Guardsman accused of leaking classified defense secrets on Discord, has pled guilty. The New York Times reports the 22-year-old withdrew his not-guilty plea on Monday, trading a guilty admission for up to around 16 years in prison. Had he gone to trial and lost, he could have faced up to 60 years.

In a Boston federal court, Teixeira pleaded guilty to six counts of “willful retention and transmission of national defense information” under the Espionage Act. Federal authorities arrested the airman at his mother’s house last April.

The Air National Guardsman is accused of sharing classified documents on a Minecraft-focused Discord server in late 2022. The posted files included volumes of information about the war in Ukraine (including details about military equipment and Russian and Ukrainian troop movements), as well as Russia’s attempts to stockpile more weapons from Egypt and Turkey. The content eventually landed on 4chan, Telegram and other Discord servers.

The leaked docs also contained a report about the hacking of an unnamed American company by “a foreign adversary” and details about a plot to assault US troops serving abroad. 

The government said it didn’t find evidence of deliberate espionage motives, nor did it accuse Teixeira of acting as a whistleblower in the mold of Edward Snowden. Instead, prosecutors concluded he wanted to gain status with his online friends. The New York Times reports that a senior federal law enforcement official, speaking anonymously to the paper, said the DOJ wouldn’t have agreed to the reduced sentencing if it had uncovered more malicious motives.

The judge presiding over the case, Indira Talwani, scheduled a hearing in September to finalize her endorsement of the deal. The sentencing guidelines range from 11 to more than 16 years in prison. His lawyer, Michael K. Bachrach, told reporters Teixeira’s immaturity played a pivotal role while promising he would push for the lowest sentence. “He is very much a kid,” the attorney reportedly said. “We will be able to establish why his youth played a substantial role.”

A NYT investigation of more than 9,500 of Teixeira’s messages, published last May, revealed an obsession with “weapons, mass shootings, shadowy conspiracy theories — and proving he was in the right, and in the know.”

Tropic Haze, the popular Yuzu Nintendo Switch emulator developer, appears to have agreed to settle Nintendo’s lawsuit against it. Less than a week after Nintendo filed the legal action, accusing the emulator’s creators of “piracy at a colossal scale,” a joint final judgment and permanent injunction filed Tuesday says Tropic Haze has agreed to pay the Mario maker $2.4 million, along with a long list of concessions.

Nintendo’s lawsuit claimed Tropic Haze violated the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). “Without Yuzu’s decryption of Nintendo’s encryption, unauthorized copies of games could not be played on PCs or Android devices,” the company wrote in its complaint. It described Yuzu as “software primarily designed to circumvent technological measures.”

Yuzu launched in 2018 as free, open-source software for Windows, Linux and Android. It could run countless copyrighted Switch games — including console sellers like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, Super Mario Odyssey and Super Mario Wonder. Reddit threads comparing Switch emulators praised Yuzu’s performance compared to rivals like Ryujinx. Yuzu introduces various bugs across different titles, but it can typically handle games at higher resolutions than the Switch, often with better frame rates, so long as your hardware is powerful enough.

Tropic Haze / Nintendo

As part of an Exhibit A attached to the proposed joint settlement, Tropic Haze agreed to a series of accommodations. In addition to paying Nintendo $2.4 million, it must permanently refrain from “engaging in activities related to offering, marketing, distributing, or trafficking in Yuzu emulator or any similar software that circumvents Nintendo’s technical protection measures.”

Tropic Haze must also delete all circumvention devices, tools and Nintendo cryptographic keys used in the emulator and turn over all circumvention devices and modified Nintendo hardware. It even has to surrender the emulator’s web domain (including any variants or successors) to Nintendo. (The website is still live now, perhaps waiting for the judgment’s final a-okay.) Not abiding by the settlement’s agreements could land Tropic Haze in contempt of court, including punitive, coercive and monetary actions.

Although piracy is the top motive for many emulator users, the software can double as crucial tools for video game preservation — making rapid legal surrenders like Tropic Haze’s potentially problematic. Without emulators, Nintendo and other copyright holders could make games obsolete for future generations as older hardware eventually becomes more difficult to find.

Nintendo’s legal team is, of course, no stranger to aggressively enforcing copyrighted material. In recent years, the company went after Switch piracy websites, sued ROM-sharing website RomUniverse for $2 million and helped send hacker Gary Bowser to prison. Although it was Valve’s doing, Nintendo’s reputation indirectly got the Dolphin Wii and GameCube emulator blocked from Steam. It’s safe to say the Mario maker doesn’t share preservationists’ views on the crucial historical role emulators can play.

Despite the settlement, it appears unlikely the open-source Yuzu will disappear entirely. The emulator is still available on GitHub, where its entire codebase can be found.

Following months of speculation, the European Commission has officially handed down its fine to Apple, and it's much higher than initially expected. Apple is on the hook to pay €1.8 billion ($1.95 billion) for restricting alternative music streaming apps on the App Store — the EU's first fine for Apple and its third-largest ever announced. It follows an investigation initially opened in 2020 following Spotify's filed complaint alleging Apple took steps to suppress the music service due to competition with iTunes and Apple Music. 

The Commission has announced "that Apple bans music streaming app developers from fully informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services available outside of the app and from providing any instructions about how to subscribe to such offers." The practice, known as anti-steering, is illegal under EU antitrust laws. 

The investigation found that Apple banned app developers from telling users the price of any subscriptions on the internet or the difference in price between in-app and outside purchases. The company also prevented developers from including information about or links to alternative subscription purchasing pages on their websites or in emails. Apple has engaged in these practices for nearly 10 years and might have caused iOS users to pay more for music streaming subscriptions than necessary due to the fees it imposes (that developers then factor into their prices). The Commission found Apple's actions also "led to non-monetary harm," creating a more frustrating user experience. 

The news follows February rumors that Apple would be hit with a fine of €500 million ($542.6 million) due to its antitrust App Store policies — less than a third of the final number. The European Commission claims it set the fine at €1.8 billion to be "sufficiently deterrent" to prevent Apple repeating its actions. However, Apple plans to appeal the decision. 

Legal claims are starting to pile up against Microsoft and OpenAI, as three more news sites have sued the firms over copyright infringement, The Verge reported. The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet filed separate lawsuits accusing ChatGPT of reproducing news content "verbatim or nearly verbatim" while stripping out important attribution like the author's name.

The sites, all represented by the same law firm, said that if ChatGPT trained on copyright material, it "would have learned to communicate that information when providing responses." Raw Story and AlterNet added that OpenAI and Microsoft must have known that the chatbot would be less popular and generate lower revenue if "users believed that ChatGPT responses violated third-party copyrights." 

The news organizations note in the lawsuit that OpenAI offers an opt-out system for website owners, meaning that the company must be aware of potential copyright infringement. Microsoft and OpenAI have also said that they'll defend customers against legal claims around copyright infringement that might arise from using their products, and even pay for incurred costs.

Late last year, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, saying it "seeks to hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages". OpenAI asked a court to dismiss that claim, saying the NYT took advantage of a ChatGPT bug that made it recite articles word for word.

The companies also face lawsuits from multiple non-fiction authors accusing them of "massive and deliberate theft of copyrighted works," and by comedian Sarah Silverman over similar claims. 

Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against the creators of a popular Switch emulator called Yuzu, which gives users a way to play games developed for the platform on their PCs and Android devices. In the lawsuit shared by Game File's Stephen Totilo, the company argued that Yuzu violates the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). 

Nintendo explained that it protects its games with encryption and other security features meant to prevent people from playing pirated copies. Yuzu has the capability to defeat those security measures and to decrypt Nintendo games. "[W]ithout Yuzu's decryption of Nintendo's encryption, unauthorized copies of games could not be played on PCs or Android devices," the company wrote in its complaint. 

It's illegal to "circumvent technological measures put into place by copyright owners to protect against unlawful access to and copying of copyrighted works" under the DMCA, Nintendo continued. And distributing "software primarily designed to circumvent technological measures" also constitutes unlawful trafficking. The defendants are, thus, "facilitating piracy at a colossal scale," the lawsuit argued. This case could set a precedent for future lawsuits against emulators, which aren't illegal in and of them themselves. As Ars Technica notes, Nintendo's arguments are calling their very nature unlawful. 

To illustrate how much Yuzu has affected its business, Nintendo revealed in its complaint that The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was illegally distributed a week and a half before its official release. It was apparently downloaded over a million times from pirated websites, which specifically noted that people can play the game file through Yuzu. The company also mentioned that Yuzu's creators are making money from their emulator. They're getting around $30,000 a month from their Patreon supporters and have earned around $50,000 from the paid version of their software on Google Play, so far. 

Nintendo is asking the court to stop Yuzu's creators from promoting and distributing the software. It's also asking for an unspecified amount in "equitable relief and damages."

Amazon is being sued by the writer of the original 1989 Patrick Swayze version of the film Road House over alleged copyright infringement in the movie's remake, The Los Angeles Times has reported. Screenwriter R. Lance Hill accuses Amazon and MGM Studios of using AI to clone actors' voices in the new production in order to finish it before the copyright expired. 

Hill said he filed a petition with the US Copyright Office in November 2021 to reclaim the rights to his original screenplay, which forms the basis of the new film. At that point, the rights were owned by Amazon Studios, as part of its acquisition of MGM, but were set to expire in November 2023. Hill alleges that once that happened, the rights would revert back to him. 

According to the lawsuit, Amazon Studios rushed ahead with the project anyway in order to finish it before the copyright deadline. Since it was stymied by the actor's strike, Hill alleges Amazon used AI to “replicate the voices” of the actors who worked in the 2024 remake. Such use violated the terms of the deal struck between the union and major studios including Amazon. 

The claim is complicated by the fact that Hill signed a "work-made-for-hire" deal with the original producer, United Artists. That effectively means that the studio hiring the writer would be both the owner and copyright holder of the work. Hill, however, dismissed that as "boilerplate" typically used in contracts. 

The lawsuit seeks to block the release of the film, set to bow at SXSW on March 8th before (controversially) heading direct to streaming on Prime Video on March 21. 

Amazon denies the claims, with a spokesperson telling The Verge that "the studio expressly instructed the filmmakers to NOT use AI in this movie." It added that if AI was utilized, it was only done in early versions of the films. Later on, filmmakers were told to remove any "AI or non-SAG AFTRA actors" for the final version. It added that other allegations are "categorically false" and that it believes its copyright on the original Road House has yet to expire. 

Amazon will pay out $1.9 million to more than 700 migrant workers to settle claims of human rights abuses following exploitative labor contracts, as reported by CNBC. The impacted laborers were working at two of the company’s warehouses in Saudi Arabia.

Amazon acknowledged the issue in a blog post, saying it hired a third-party labor rights expert to investigate warehouse conditions. The organization found numerous violations of Amazon’s supply chain standards, including “substandard living accommodations, contract and wage irregularities and delays in the resolution of worker complaints.”

This follows an Amnesty International report from last October that detailed various alleged human rights abuses experience by those contracted to work in Amazon facilities in the region, and noted that many of the impacted laborers were “highly likely to be victims of human trafficking.” The report also suggested that Amazon was aware of the high risk for labor abuse when operating in Saudi Arabia but still “failed to take sufficient action to prevent such abuses.”

Simultaneous reports by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism offered detailed accounts of the conditions that these laborers allegedly suffered under, according to NBC News. The investigations found that workers had to pay illegal recruitment fees of up to $2,040 to get hired. This forced the migrant workers, many of whom were from Nepal, to take out loans with high interest rates.

Investigators also learned that these workers were living in squalid conditions, with one laborer saying he was living “in a crowded room with seven other men, jammed with bunk beds infested with bed bugs.” The water was said to be salty and undrinkable. Amnesty International echoed these findings, saying that the accommodations were “lacking even the most basic facilities.”

The combination of the exorbitant hiring fees, along with the associated loans, amounted to “human trafficking for the purpose of labor exploitation as defined by international law and standards,” Amnesty alleged in its report. 

Amazon has stated that it has “remediated the most serious concerns” involving the two Saudi warehouses, including an upgrade to housing accommodations. “Our goal is for all of our vendors to have management systems in place that ensure safe and healthy working conditions; this includes responsible recruitment practices,” the company wrote.

It’s worth noting that though that $1.9 million number seems high, it breaks down to around $2,700 per employee. Amazon made $576 billion in 2023, which comes out to more than $1.5 billion each day.

Amazon doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to labor. It’s regularly accused of breaking labor laws, particularly at its many product warehouses. The company is also rabidly anti-union, as many of these complaints involve attempts to stop workers from unionizing. Amazon faces multiple ongoing federal probes into its safety practices, and it has been fined by federal safety regulators for exposing warehouse workers to unnecessary risks.

However, the company remains defiant in its efforts to chip away at worker’s rights. Amazon recently filed a legal document that claims the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is unconstitutional, joining Elon Musk’s SpaceX and grocery giant Trader Joe’s. The NLRB is an independent arm of the federal government that enforces US labor law and has been operating since 1935.