The long list of laws and regulations that would have had a low-status individual jailed if caught.
If you don't believe me, try hacking some government sites and see what happens to you.
But OpenAI is a huge corporation and low-status laws don't apply.
Although to be fair the US has a number of prominent high status individuals who clearly belong in jail, so it's not as if Altman is getting uniquely personal treatment.
I'm not a lawyer but from my laymen perspective I see a whole lot of negligence and racketeering. Also the bribery with the American current administration.
These things may not be illegal in America but they certainly are illegal some jurisdiction that OpenAI and others operate in.
Copyright infringement for sure, but definitely the CFAA with the hacking. That could be life in prison, but the CFAA is mostly a law written to stick the little guys in jail. OpenAI is an American company. They could basically kill people and not be charged, that’s just how American laws work. The more people you get together, the more the accountability spreads, until nobody is held accountable.
I am not the earlier poster, but I believe copyright infringement at the heart of their business model is what is referred to.
If I download a bunch of music from a torrent without a license, even if I don't listen to it, I'm liable, but if OpenAI or other LLMs gets content by some other unlicensed means (Anna's Archive, t), they are somehow not liable for the copy they made however temporary (but not so temporary if they leave it around to train a second model)?
And/or derivative works? And/or contributory copyright infringement when they regurgitate that copyrighted text when given certain prompts?
I get there is some nuance to copyright law, (four prongs), some utility to the outcome, and some legal (but not plausible) deniability. But there is no way they have clean hands on the copyright front for at least some actions they have taken. If there were, it would be in all their marketing and they would be pushing regulators to bind their competitors, onshore or offshore, more tightly in this regard.
I was around when search engines took advantage of similar ambiguities in copyright that took many many years to get litigated for similar reasons.
If you don't believe me, try hacking some government sites and see what happens to you.
But OpenAI is a huge corporation and low-status laws don't apply.
Although to be fair the US has a number of prominent high status individuals who clearly belong in jail, so it's not as if Altman is getting uniquely personal treatment.