Factual Allegations: Open AI's Codex and Copilot Under Scrutiny

VII. FACTUAL ALLEGATIONS

A. Introduction

47. This class action against Defendants concerns an OpenAI product called Codex and a GitHub product called Copilot.

48. OpenAI began development of Codex sometime after OpenAI was founded in December 2015 and released Codex on a limited basis in August 2021.

49. GitHub began development of Copilot sometime in 2019, released it on a limited basis in June 2021, and released it as a paid subscription service in June 2022.

50. Codex and Copilot are assistive AI-based systems offered to software programmers. These AI systems are each trained on a large corpus of publicly accessible software code and other materials, including all the Licensed Materials. Defendants describe these products as making coding easier by accepting a code “prompt” from a programmer and emitting a possible completion of that code, which is referred to herein as Output, as set forth above. Defendants claim Codex and Copilot do not retain copies of the materials they are trained on. In practice, however, the Output is often a near-identical reproduction of code from the training data.

51. Codex and Copilot are related. Copilot is a joint venture between GitHub and OpenAI. Codex is a standalone product released by OpenAI that also “powers GitHub Copilot, which [OpenAI] built and launched in partnership with GitHub.”[5] “GitHub Copilot uses the OpenAI Codex to suggest code and entire functions in real-time, right from your editor.”[6] The version of Codex used to power Copilot is modified from OpenAI’s standalone version. Defendants have kept secret the details of Codex’s modifications and its integration into or interaction with Copilot.

[5] See https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex/.

[6] See https://github.com/features/copilot/.