Newly released court filings quote an OpenAI researcher saying: “I was just worried about optics - i.e. 'openai uses copyrighted data from sketchy russian website’ showing up on HN would be unfortunate."

That's just one of several interesting quotes that have surfaced in documents from the Authors Guild's lawsuit against OpenAI.

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swiftcoder an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It's good to know we all live rent-free in Dario Amodei's head

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gizajob 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Same as all the world’s copyright text lives rent-free in Claude and ChatGPT.

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optimalsolver an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You might be thinking of Demis Altman.

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lensecat an hour ago | parent [-]

Think they're referring to the following, when Amodei was still working for OpenAI:

'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.”'

	▲	yorwba 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I was curious what he was responding to. Per https://authorsguild.org/app/uploads/2026/09/Class-Plaintiff... it was "On July 19, 2019, McCandlish wrote in an OpenAI Slack channel: “We’re not sure if we’re going to release the Foresight LM Scaling paper publicly, but if we do we were thinking about removing all mentions of LibGen, since it's a bit of a sketchy data source." The paper may or may not be https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361 where they write "we also test on similarly-prepared samples of Books Corpus [ZKZ+15], Common Crawl [Fou], English Wikipedia, and a collection of publicly-available Internet Books."

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locknitpicker an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Newly released court filings quote an OpenAI researcher saying: “I was just worried about optics (...)"

As a side-note, most orgs already cover the need to STFU in their training material for new hires, particularly how personal comments should not and cannot represent the company. I'm sure this lawsuit will be explicitly mentioned in upcoming versions of this sort training material in multiple orgs.

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aaron695 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]