OpenAI execs internally acknowledged mass book piracy was illegal and worried about Hacker News optics

OpenAI Feared "Optics" of what might appear on Hacker News

Unsealed court filings in the Authors Guild v. OpenAI case show top execs privately called their use of pirated book datasets like LibGen 'data we know is not legal' but kept using it anyway. CTO Mira Murati, co-founder Ilya Sutskever, and others discussed the legal risks; research lead Bob McGrew flagged concerns about 'optics of what might appear on Hacker News.' The filings also reveal internal awareness that mass book ingestion would harm authors' livelihoods, alongside a belief that skipping it would make competitive models impossible.

Why it matters: Newly unsealed filings in Authors Guild v. OpenAI show execs internally acknowledged LibGen datasets as 'illegal' while discussing Hacker News optics. Hits all three HKR axes: conflict-driven, concrete names and quotes, and lands in the middle of the copyright debate. Held bel...