Investor Michael Moritz files amicus brief urging a licensing market for news in OpenAI case

What happened

On 30 October 2026, technology investor Michael Moritz filed a 13-page proposed amicus brief in *In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation*, No. 1:25-md-03143 (S.D.N.Y., Judge Sidney H. Stein), docket entry 2434-1. The brief addresses the parties' competing motions for summary judgment on fair use.

Who filed it

Moritz is a technology investor, philanthropist, author and former journalist. He worked as a correspondent and San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and published *The Little Kingdom*, a book about Apple and Steve Jobs, in 1984. As an investor he has held board positions at Google, Yahoo!, PayPal, LinkedIn and Stripe, and entities he controls have invested directly in companies developing large language models. With his wife Harriet Heyman he founded the Crankstart Foundation, which has funded independent investigative journalism including ProPublica and helped establish The San Francisco Standard.

What the brief argues

Moritz does not take a position on the summary-judgment motions themselves. He asks the court to find that developers of large language models cannot copy the works of journalists and offer substitutive news without offering any form of compensation. His central argument is that both large language models and independent journalism are fundamentally important, that models depend on the continued generation of quality independent journalism, and that a workable licensing market between publishers and model developers must be developed so the two can coexist. The brief argues that AI-generated answers to online queries undermine publishers' advertising and subscription business model even when attribution is given, and that without compensation the practice threatens both the survival of independent journalism and the long-term sustainability of the models themselves.