Future AI Products May Be Innovative, But Copilot and Codex Are Not

VII. FACTUAL ALLEGATIONS

J. Conclusion of Factual Allegations

135. Future AI products may represent a bold and innovative step forward. GitHub Copilot and OpenAI Codex, however, do not. Defendants should not have released these products until they could ensure that they did not constantly violate Plaintiffs’ and the Class’s intellectual-property rights, licenses, and other rights.

136. Defendants have made no attempt to comply with the open-source licenses that are attached to much of their training data. Instead, they have pretended those licenses do not exist, and trained Codex and Copilot to do the same. By simultaneously violating the open-source licenses of tens-of-thousands—possibly millions—of software developers, Defendants have accomplished software piracy on an unprecedented scale. As Microsoft’s Co-Founder Bill Gates once said regarding software piracy: “the thing you do is theft.”[31]

137. There is no inherent limitation or constraint of AI systems that made any of this necessary. Defendants chose to build AI systems designed to enhance their own profit at the expense of a global open-source community that they had once sought to foster and protect. GitHub and OpenAI are profiting at the expense of Plaintiffs’ and the Class’s rights.

[31] https://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_01/gatesletter.html