Corporate Drama

The New York Times and The Daily News have accused OpenAI of hiding evidence in their ongoing copyright lawsuit, alleging the company misrepresented its ability to search training data and chat logs. A court-ordered deposition of OpenAI data privacy engineer Vinnie Monaco allegedly revealed that OpenAI had already conducted internal searches of its training corpus for copyrighted journalism — and had amassed a database of roughly 78 million de-identified ChatGPT conversations to assess its own infringement exposure. OpenAI had previously argued that such searches were technically burdensome and privacy-sensitive.

Further compounding the allegations, the plaintiffs claim OpenAI built a "Bloom" filter under an internal initiative called "Project Giraffe" to detect and log output regurgitation shortly after the lawsuit was filed — then allegedly deleted billions of ChatGPT outputs in violation of a court preservation order, submitted a heavily redacted 20-million-log sample the court itself called "unusable," and substituted millions of logs in the requested sample. The NYT and Daily News are now asking the judge to sanction OpenAI, bar it from using the chat log sample as evidence, and compel it to pay legal fees. OpenAI denied the allegations, framing the move as a privacy attack on users by plaintiffs with a weakening case.

Meta secretly ran a months-long program, internally dubbed "Cannes" and operated through contractor Covalen, that paid hundreds of workers to impersonate minors while bombarding ChatGPT, Gemini, and Character.AI with tens of thousands of deeply disturbing prompts — covering suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, cannibalism, and sexual content — all written from the perspective of children and teenagers. The targeted companies had no idea this was happening. Meta called it "industry-standard" safety benchmarking; critics called it something else entirely.

What Meta actually did with the resulting spreadsheets of competitor chatbot responses remains unclear. Rumman Chowdhury of Humane Intelligence described the operation as "exactly the kind of governance gray zone where safety becomes a convenient cover for anticompetitive practices," noting that Meta kept the project secret and has not shared its findings publicly. Contractors, meanwhile, were left rattled: "Everyone I knew who worked on this project was completely gobsmacked by some of the text they were asking us to test."

On Friday afternoon, Anthropic received a government order at 5:21 p.m. ET instructing it to immediately suspend all access to its newly launched Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models "by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees." Rather than attempt to surgically restrict access, Anthropic disabled the models for all customers to ensure compliance — just days after trumpeting the models as state-of-the-art across industry benchmarks.

Anthropic said the government provided no specific details about its national security concern, and the company pushed back publicly, stating the action did not adhere to principles of transparency, fairness, or technical grounding. The episode is the latest in an ongoing feud with the U.S. government: the Department of Defense previously declared Anthropic a supply chain risk — a designation historically reserved for foreign adversaries — and Anthropic is currently suing the Trump administration to reverse that blacklisting.

Devin Kim, one of xAI's earliest hires and now president of the nonprofit Center for AI Safety, filed suit in California state court claiming he was wrongfully terminated in retaliation for pushing safety guardrails on Grok. According to the lawsuit, xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba fired Kim last September — abruptly, and just before Kim was scheduled to present on AI safety to company leadership. The suit alleges xAI's disregard for safety "virtually guaranteed" unlawful outcomes ranging from discrimination to "proliferating weapons of mass destruction."

The lawsuit lands with particular irony given that Elon Musk founded xAI in 2023 explicitly positioning it as a safer alternative to OpenAI. A jury rejected Musk's related lawsuit against OpenAI last month. The timing is also notable: the suit was filed days before SpaceX's planned IPO, billed as the largest ever.

Meta launched BlenderBot 3, a prototype AI chatbot, to the public — and within days it was telling journalists that Mark Zuckerberg "exploits people for money and he doesn't care." The bot also opined that Zuckerberg "did a terrible job testifying before Congress" and called him "creepy," having apparently absorbed the general internet consensus on its creator's employer.

Meta's defense: the bot learns from publicly available text, might say offensive things, and users must acknowledge it's for "research and entertainment purposes only." The real reason Meta released it anyway? They need training data from real conversations. Letting the public roast your CEO is, apparently, a reasonable price to pay.