Ex-Google news chief Jim Albrecht files amicus brief: RAG is industrial-scale copying

What happened

On 30 October 2026, Jim Albrecht filed a 19-page proposed amicus brief in support of the news plaintiffs' motion for summary judgment in *In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation*, No. 1:25-md-03143 (S.D.N.Y., Judge Sidney H. Stein), docket entry 2452-1.

Who filed it

Albrecht served as Senior Director of News Ecosystem Products at Google from 2017 to 2023, where he built products intended to strengthen the online environment for news publishers. He has publicly warned, including in a February 2024 Washington Post essay, about the harms generative search may cause to the news ecosystem.

What the brief argues

Albrecht's core argument is that retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is an industrial-scale intermediate-copying operation: unlike a search engine, which returns a title, a snippet and a link, a RAG system copies the relevant documents or large chunks of them and hands them to the LLM, which rewrites them into an answer the user sees — the copies are made nevertheless, across hundreds of millions of ChatGPT sessions a day. He argues that implied licences do not cover copying that blocks the content owner's expected benefit, that the copying itself is the violation while the output demonstrates its substitutive purpose, and that the economic harm to publishers is ongoing and inevitable. He stresses that RAG is unrelated to LLM training and raises distinct copyright questions.

Status

This is a proposed amicus brief in support of the news plaintiffs. It is the filer's argument, not a court finding; the court has not ruled on the summary-judgment motions.