At the turkey end of last week OpenAI confronted two significant legal challenges: a motion for preliminary injunction from Elon Musk and a copyright infringement lawsuit from major Canadian media companies.
Court documents show that on November 29, Elon Musk filed a motion in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California seeking to enjoin OpenAI from:
- Making, enforcing, or furthering agreements not to invest in OpenAI's competitors
- Interlocking directorates or benefitting from wrongfully obtained competitively sensitive information via Microsoft-OpenAI board interlocks
- Converting OpenAI Inc. to a for-profit enterprise or transferring material assets
- Causing OpenAI Inc. to contract with entities in which defendants have material financial interests
Musk verified that at least one major investor in OpenAI's October 2024 funding round subsequently declined to invest in xAI. "No objective observer can look at OpenAI today and say it bears any resemblance whatsoever to what it promised to be," Musk's attorneys wrote.
On November 28, six Canadian media companies filed their lawsuit, documenting specific content volumes:
- Torstar Companies: 3,200,000 works
- Postmedia: 3,500,000 works
- The Globe: 2,300,000 works
- The Canadian Press: 3,500,000 works
- CBC/Radio-Canada: 3,600,000 works
The Canadian plaintiffs allege that OpenAI "brazenly misappropriated" its content and circumvented technological protection measures, including "exclusion protocols" and "account and subscription-based restrictions." The lawsuit seeks damages and statutory damages of $20,000 per work.
OpenAI defended its practices, stating ChatGPT is used by "hundreds of millions of people around the world... to improve their daily lives, inspire creativity, and solve hard problems" and that its models are "trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use and related international copyright principles."
The court scheduled a hearing on Musk's injunction request for January 7, 2025. Both cases directly challenge OpenAI's data collection practices and corporate structure. As we look towards 2025 and the year of the AI Agent the last thing OpenAI needs is yet another lawsuit.