OpenAI, Microsoft fend off part of software developer lawsuit over AI training

Two anonymous plaintiffs, seeking to represent a class of people who own open-source code published on GitHub, sued Microsoft and OpenAI in 2022. They said the companies trained OpenAI's Codex and Microsoft's Copilot AI coding tools with code from GitHub repositories in violation of a federal copyright law — the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) — and open-source licensing terms.

The DMCA bars the removal of copyright management information (CMI) from copyrighted works. CMI is identifying information about a work such as its author and copyright owner.

The developers alleged that the companies violate the DMCA when Codex and Copilot reproduce their code without attributing it to them.

The lawsuit was one of the first in a wave of high-stakes cases brought by copyright owners including authors, news outlets and music labels against tech companies over the use of their material in AI training. Most of those cases focus on copyright infringement claims, unlike the software developers' case.