A Brief Rundown of All the Lawsuits and Investigations OpenAI Is Currently Buried Under

The robopocalypse is here, and it’s incredibly stupid. It’s threatening to kill our jobs, our society, and eventually, probably all of us. Fortunately, we have laws preventing that from happening, even if they were intended just to keep other people from doing all those things. That’s why OpenAI, the organization that brought us ChatGPT, is currently struggling to breathe with its little robot lungs under the weight of all the lawsuits and investigations currently sitting on it.

Of course, most of the lawsuits concern the copyright ownership of the works ChatGPT has been “trained on,” which were written by real people with a financial stake in stopping any technology from barfing them out whole cloth. Nobody mentally inserts the title “Intellectual Property Crusader” after “Sarah Silverman,” but she led the charge in 2023, followed by groups that include such famous authors as George R.R. Martin and John Grisham. Nobody took the opportunity to ask Martin about his own blatant plagiarism of Gone With the freaking Wind, but fine.

To liven things up, and probably because he felt left out by the cool people, Elon Musk threw his hat into the legal ring against OpenAI as well. That might seem odd because Musk was actually a co-founder of the organization, but that’s also the root of his lawsuit: He’s claiming the company has “breach(ed) its founding agreement and diverg(ed) from its original, nonprofit mission” by charging some of its customers for some of its services. This is a rare instance in which OpenAI immediately hit back, publishing old emails from Musk that prove, according to them, that he’s just mad they wouldn’t sell to Tesla and accusing him of abusing the legal process to access their records. “Bitchhhh,” they regrettably failed to add.

The organization has even landed itself in hot water with more than one government, with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and European Union data regulators. Unsurprisingly, the SEC is investigating mysterious suspicions that the organization’s investors have been “misled,” while Europe is more concerned with privacy, probably because of all the nudity over there. 

Incidentally, we asked ChatGPT about all this, and since it hasn’t been updated since January 2022, it played dumb. 

Cowards.