Alec Radford, known for his triumphant contributions to OpenAI's groundbreaking AI technology, has been handed a subpoena connected with a copyright lawsuit against the AI startup, as stated in a court report on Tuesday.

This development came to light in legal paperwork submitted to the U.S. District Court in California's Northern District from an attorney representing the plaintiffs. The documentation revealed that Radford was served the subpoena on February 25.

Radford, who said his goodbyes to OpenAI last year to explore independent research, spearheaded OpenAI's pivotal GPT (generative pre-trained transformers) research paper. GPTs form the building blocks of OpenAI's hottest products, most notably their AI-chatbot platform, ChatGPT.

Radford hopped on the OpenAI bandwagon in 2016, a year after its inception. During his tenure, Radford was pivotal to the development of numerous GPT series models, the Whisper speech recognition model, and DALL-E, an image generation creation.

The copyright case, titled “re OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation,” involves authors like Paul Tremblay, Sarah Silverman, and Michael Chabon. They assert that OpenAI utilized their creative works to cultivate its AI models, thereby infringing their copyrights. Moreover, they argue that ChatGPT violated their copyrights by openly quoting from their works without appropriate acknowledgement.

The Court, last year, dismissed two allegations from the plaintiffs against OpenAI but allowed the direct infringement accusation to progress. OpenAI is steadfast in its stance that using copyrighted data for training purposes is defended under fair use.

However, Radford isn't the only influential individual the authors' attorneys are reaching for. They are also trying to summon Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, two former OpenAI employees who parted ways with the company to establish Anthropic. Both Amodei and Mann have resisted, claiming such motions hold unnecessary burdens.

A U.S. magistrate judge rule this week that Amodei will have to participate in a lengthy questioning session about his work with OpenAI in two copyright suits, one of which is a case filed by the Authors Guild.