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.
As a guy who actually knows what's going on inside the judiciary, and what's going on with OpenAI (half-million view post included below), I can tell you unequivocally that anyone on the board of OpenAI is a slimy, virtue signaling liar.
I promised a thread this weekend about OpenAI and the lawsuit I filed against them, and an explanation of what I hope to achieve here. Sorry for the length, but there's a lot going on here.
To begin with, we need to understand what “OpenAI” really is: a poorly constructed scheme operated by the Y Combinator Group to avoid the requirements of copyright law, tax law, and fair competition law in order to enrich their own insider group, the Y Combinator network.
What’s Y Combinator you ask? YC is a ‘tech accelerator’ out of San Francisco, CA. They work with tech startups to scale them up at alarming speeds (a process called Blitzscaling) and provide access to the Venture Capital money that drives these products. YC has funded over 4,000 startups since 2005. When you think of YC and blitzscaling, think of companies like Airbnb and Instacart; they captured incredible portions of market share with their VC funding and grand promises to the gig economy workers they pray on, then rapidly raise their rates and include absurd restrictions and costs until they are making a bare minimum 20% cut off of every transaction to repay these VCs. As these companies mature, they min-max to suck every penny they can out of local economies, there is nothing altruistic about them. They are very proud of this mode of operation; they refer to themselves as ‘Masters of Scale.’ It is also notable that Microsoft has invested in many YC companies.
Let’s look at why I claim OpenAI is just a poor cover for the activities the YC group:
1. Of the notable board members, investors, and business partners of OpenAI, well over 90% of them have previous financial dealings with Sam Altman and YC. Read the complaint, be horrified when you see the list.
2. Sam Altman stepped down as president of YC to become CEO of OpenAI. – Same leader
3. Board members, technology, corporate structures, and even the names are constantly passed back and forth and used freely among this group. For example YC Research, once a Research arm of YC, is now called “OpenResearch.” This is called comingling. When a corporation is formed, it has a separate legal identity from its individual owners. Comingling is generally illegal whether you are for-profit or non-profit. All the resources of the non-profit arm of OpenAI are comingled with resources of the for-profit arm. Same board members, same technology assets, and again, even the same name. OpenAI confirms all of this in a blog post.
4. OpenAI has claimed from founding that the company mission is non-profit; they have committed to ‘broad distribution’ to ‘benefit all of humanity.’ However, a close look at forming partnerships easily debunks this claim. While many developers are on a waiting list to create apps working with OpenAI’s GPT software, the business partners who received early access and are at the top of this list are overwhelmingly YC network founders and investors. Devs, while you are waiting for access right now, over 70 YC companies from the latest W23 batch are ‘AI companies.’ These companies will get access to OpenAI’s GPT and API while you are still waiting. The game is rigged; by the time you get access YC will have lined their pockets and captured the majority of market share. It is the Y Combinator network, not ‘all of humanity,’ that is reaping significant financial benefits from the founding and operation of OpenAI.
5. The members of the YC network came together and pooled their resources under the banner of ‘OpenAI’ to avoid copyright protections, paying taxes, and create, for themselves, the world’s most powerful supercomputer.
So as a member of the group ‘all of humanity,’ the reported beneficiaries of OpenAI, I have filed a claim for Breach of Fiduciary Duties. Breach of Fiduciary Duties is the umbrella my complaints generally fall under. The board members of OpenAI have a legal duty to serve the mission of the non-profit in good faith, to act prudently, and to obey the law, all of which they are not doing. OpenAI has *constantly* confirmed via public messaging their mission is to “benefit all of humanity;” the only logical conclusion to these statements is that all of humanity, you, me, and people on every continent, are beneficiaries of OpenAI’s mission. *I firmly believe, and state in good faith, that every human being on the planet has standing to sue OpenAI for these egregious actions.* Further, I look forward to hearing the legal team of OpenAI explain how this is not the case. If anyone has any illusions about the altruistic intentions of OpenAI, their explanation should put these illusions to bed.
Do I think my claim will go anywhere? Hard to say. The defendants are overwhelmingly some of the richest and most connected parties in the world. They have a combined of net worth of trillions of dollars. I’m litigating the suit on their home turf in SF, CA. However, I hope some attention on my claim will make it obvious that the State Attorneys General should be litigating and correcting this situation. OpenAI has repeatedly promised its benefits to “All of Humanity” in a ‘broad and distributed fashion.’ Any SAG that isn’t bought and sold by the upper class should be filing suit on behalf of their state constituents. One of my goals here is for us all, together, to bring enough attention to this problem to drag the SAGs into this. I’m happy to do the SAG’s jobs for them until they wake from their slumber.
People will make many claims about me and my complaint. People will claim I am crazy, or I have no right to file a suit, or that OpenAI has no obligations to me despite the absurd level of virtue signaling about ‘benefitting all of humanity.’ Those people are gate-keepers, and nothing they say stopped me from filing my suit, and nothing they say will convince me not to make my attempt to keep OpenAI accountable. They will tell you that everything they have done here is fair and above-board, they will tell you there will be plenty of jobs and opportunity left after they have sucked the financial landscape dry. They will tell you I’m crazy, and that if you even think of challenging them, you are crazy too. You know better; if we give an inch on this, they will take miles. Be loud. Protect your work. Protect your future. Don’t for one second think you are crazy for being concerned with any of this, you’re not.
Oct 10, 2025 · 10:05 PM UTC