A U.S. magistrate judge overseeing major copyright litigation against OpenAI and Microsoft has decided to remain on the case after disclosing that she previously owned shares in Microsoft.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona Wang revealed in a filing that she had held Microsoft stock while handling pretrial matters in the sprawling litigation in Manhattan. Under judicial ethics rules, the financial interest would ordinarily have required her to step aside.
Wang said, however, that she has since sold her Microsoft holdings and concluded that the investment did not influence any decisions she made in the proceedings.
The judge also pointed to the broader public interest in keeping the case on its existing track. Reassigning the matter to another magistrate judge, she said, could create unnecessary disruption as the complex litigation moves forward.
The dispute brings together copyright claims filed by authors and major news organizations over the use of protected works to develop artificial intelligence systems.
The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, alleging that millions of its articles were used without authorization to train systems including ChatGPT. A separate group of prominent authors, including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and George R.R. Martin, brought another lawsuit that year, accusing the companies of using their books for AI training without permission.
Those proceedings, along with related copyright cases against OpenAI, were later consolidated in New York.
The litigation is part of a much larger legal battle unfolding across the United States over how copyrighted books, news articles, images and other material can be used to train generative AI systems. Copyright holders argue that technology companies have exploited their work without consent or compensation, while AI developers face mounting questions over the legal boundaries of training their models.
With Wang remaining on the case after disposing of her Microsoft investment, the consolidated litigation will continue under its existing judicial supervision.
