Ex-Google news chief Jim Albrecht files amicus brief: RAG is industrial-scale copying
2026/10/30 · 公開情報から自動収集したものです。人による確認は行っていません。
この内容は原文の言語（英語）でのみ公開されています。
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.