From the Authors Guild.
(New York, September 21, 2026) Explosive new documents released last Thursday in Authors Guild v. OpenAI—the major book authors’ ongoing lawsuit alleging OpenAI and Microsoft illegally trained their products on copyrighted books—show that executives and employees at both companies intentionally broke the law and their disdain for human authorship. The brief meticulously documents AI developers’ knowledge of the damage their actions could do to authors, publishers, and American culture itself, warning that “OpenAI’s GPT models pose an existential threat to those who write and publish books.”
OpenAI and Microsoft Knew Their Systems Would Replace Human Writers – OpenAI Policy Director Jack Clark stated in May 2020: “Our work on AI and Creativity is going to increasingly lead to us creating systems that substitute for the labor of [] people . . . The better we do on GPT-X, the more worried genre fiction authors will become about us substituting for them on Amazon.” He then doubled down: “Our work in this area will make people unemployed. . . There will be a point where a bunch of artists express worry about what we’re doing here and we’ll likely ignore their concerns and release anyway . . .”
The bare-facedness of it all is staggering, or it would be in any other era. Today it’s just Tuesday.
They Tried to Hide the Evidence – In an effort to cover its tracks the company called “Project Clear,” OpenAI deleted its LibGen files in the summer of 2022. “On June 15, 2022, in an OpenAI Slack channel, [OpenAI Corporate Designee] Paino asked: ‘general q: how concerned are we about mentions of libgen? (they’re all over google docs/slack/github . . .). That evening, [OpenAI VP of Research Bob] McGrew wrote to Paino and Nicholas Ryder: “Given how much OpenAI is in the news, now is the right time to excise Libgen from our systems and storage. What would be involved in that?’”
And of course they tried to hide it, because of course they did.
“Don’t be evil.” —Google, 2004
A PSA just for Big Tech, because evidently they neglected to scrape Merriam-Webster.
Read the full story here, if you think you can stomach it.
#thiswritinglife Chatter Authors Guild Microsoft OpenAI lawsuit