US Magistrate Judge Ona Wang, who oversees pretrial matters in a landmark copyright lawsuit brought by authors and media outlets including The New York Times against OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, disclosed in a Manhattan court filing on Friday that she had owned Microsoft shares but would not recuse herself from the case.
Wang said in the filing that court rules would normally require her to step aside under such circumstances, but she had since sold her stake in the company and that the holding had not influenced any of her rulings.
She added that continuing to oversee the case served the public interest, saying it would help avoid the matter being reassigned to another judge.
No immediate comment
Representatives for Microsoft, OpenAI and The New York Times did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday. A spokesperson for Wang's court, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, and a lawyer for the plaintiffs both declined to comment.
Background to the lawsuit
The New York Times filed its lawsuit in 2023, accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train ChatGPT, the AI chatbot developed by OpenAI. Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI and has built the company's technology into its own products.
Separately that same year, a group of authors including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and George R.R. Martin sued the companies over the use of their books to train ChatGPT. Those cases, along with related lawsuits against OpenAI, were consolidated in New York last year.
Dozens of other complaints have also been filed by copyright holders against technology companies over what they describe as the unauthorized use of their material to train artificial intelligence systems, part of a broader wave of litigation testing how copyright law applies to AI training data.
What comes next
The case remains under Wang's supervision as pretrial proceedings continue, with the underlying dispute over whether AI companies can use copyrighted material to train their systems still unresolved.
