2026-09-27 / Signal #4
OpenAI feared Hacker News more than the law
“They knew it was illegal. They were more scared of Hacker News.”
The Story
Newly highlighted court filings in *Authors Guild v. OpenAI* show staff knew LibGen was “sketchy,” trained GPT-3 on torrented books anyway, and worried about *optics* — specifically a Hacker News headline like “openai uses copyrighted data from sketchy russian website.” Jack Clark wrote that the better they did, the more genre-fiction authors should worry about being substituted on Amazon; another researcher called author displacement “acceptable economic disruption.” Microsoft was told about LibGen as early as 2019.
Why It Matters
Internet culture eating the origin myth. The lab didn’t fear judges first; it feared the comments. That’s a builder-culture story about what actually governs these companies.
Evidence
Authors Guild unsealed briefs; HN front page
Sources
Daily scan: 2026-09-27