U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona Wang, who is overseeing pretrial issues in a landmark copyright lawsuit brought by authors and news outlets including the New York Times against OpenAI and its largest financial backer Microsoft, disclosed in a court filing in Manhattan on Friday that she owned Microsoft stock but would not recuse herself from the case.
Wang said in the filing that while judicial rules would ordinarily require her to recuse, she had divested her interest in the company and that it had not impacted any of her decisions. The judge also said that continuing to oversee the case would be in the public interest in order to “avoid having the matter reassigned to another magistrate judge.”
Spokespeople for the court, Microsoft, OpenAI and The New York Times did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing on Monday. An attorney for the authors declined to comment.
The Times' lawsuit, first filed in 2023, accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train ChatGPT. The authors, who include John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and George R.R. Martin, separately sued the companies the same year for using their books to train OpenAI's popular chatbot.
Those cases and related lawsuits against OpenAI were consolidated in New York last year. Dozens of other complaints have also been brought by copyright owners against tech companies over what they call the theft of their material to train AI systems.
