Dylan

There’s quite a lot more to the story than this. As everyone knows, we are actively defending against Elon in a lawsuit where he is trying to damage OpenAI for his own financial benefit. Encode, the organization for which @_NathanCalvin serves as the General Counsel, was one of the first third parties - whose funding has not been fully disclosed - that quickly filed in support of Musk. For a safety policy organization to side with Elon (?), that raises legitimate questions about what is going on. We wanted to know, and still are curious to know, whether Encode is working in collaboration with third parties who have a commercial competitive interest adverse to OpenAI. The stated narrative makes this sound like something it wasn’t. 1/ Subpoenas are to be expected, and it would be surprising if Encode did not get counsel on this from their lawyers. When a third party inserts themselves into active litigation, they are subject to standard legal processes. We issued a subpoena to ensure transparency around their involvement and funding. This is a routine step in litigation, not a separate legal action against Nathan or Encode. 2/ Subpoenas are part of how both sides seek information and gather facts for transparency; they don’t assign fault or carry penalties. Our goal was to understand the full context of why Encode chose to join Elon’s legal challenge. 3/ We’ve also been asking for some time who is funding their efforts connected to both this lawsuit and SB53, since they’ve publicly linked themselves to those initiatives. If they don’t have relevant information, they can simply respond that way. 4/ This is not about opposition to regulation or SB53. We did not oppose SB53; we provided comments for harmonization with other standards. We were also one of the first to sign the EU AIA COP, and still one of a few labs who test with the CAISI and UK AISI. We’ve also been clear with our own staff that they are free to express their takes on regulation, even if they disagree with the company, like during the 1047 debate (see thread below). 5/ We checked with our outside law firm about the deputy visit. The law firm used their standard vendor for service, and it’s quite common for deputies to also work as part-time process servers. We’ve been informed that they called Calvin ahead of time to arrange a time for him to accept service, so it should not have been a surprise. 6/ Our counsel interacted with Nathan’s counsel and by all accounts the exchanges were civil and professional on both sides. Nathan’s counsel denied they had materials in some cases and refused to respond in other cases. Discovery is now closed, and that’s that. For transparency, below is the excerpt from the subpoena that lists all of the requests for production. People can judge for themselves what this was really focused on. Most of our questions still haven’t been answered.