Authors Suing OpenAI Over ChatGPT Want Anthropic Founders’ Files

Authors suing OpenAI Inc. over how it trained ChatGPT asked a court to require disclosure of documents from “key figures” including former OpenAI executives who later founded Anthropic PBC.

Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang should order the AI giant to search the documents of Jack Clark and Daniela Amodei—who left OpenAI in 2020 to start the rival AI company—to address “significant gaps in discovery,” according to the class plaintiffs’ letter motion to compel filed Thursday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The authors also asked to add Tom Rubin, OpenAI’s chief of IP and content, as a document custodian in the discovery process, which has proven contentious.

“All three witnesses have unique knowledge of issues central to this case, and because including them would not be expensive or time consuming, this request is proportional to the needs of the case,” the authors said in the redacted letter.

The authors have accused OpenAI of illegally downloading their copyrighted books to train ChatGPT and of producing infringing copies of its works in AI outputs.

Clark was OpenAI’s director of strategy and communications. While current custodians include employees who know about the selection of datasets the company used to train its AI, Clark “directed the characterization of that use as a matter of OpenAI policy,” the authors wrote.

Amodei—now the president of Anthropic—was OpenAI’s vice president of safety and policy and a “key player in early OpenAI product rollouts,” the authors said.

“Ms. Amodei’s custodian files uniquely capture OpenAI’s public posture in these early days, and what it chose to say (and not say) about the provenance of its training data,” they said.

The authors said any burden on OpenAI would be minimal because Amodei and Clark left the company and have no custodial documents more recent than 2020.

Anthropic is tied up in its own copyright litigation, facing suits brought by music publishers and Reddit Inc. The company is also working to finalize a $1.5 billion settlement with a set of authors in a class action in California federal court.

Susman Godfrey LLP; Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP; Cowan, Debaets, Abrahams & Sheppard LLP; Joseph Saveri Law Firm; Cafferty Clobes Meriwether & Sprengel LLP; and Boies Schiller Flexner LLP represent the class plaintiffs. Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP; Latham & Watkins LLP; and Morrison & Foerster LLP represent OpenAI.

The case is In Re: OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, S.D.N.Y., No. 1:25-md-03143, motion to compel filed 11/20/25.