David Henry Hwang

David Henry Hwang (b. 1957) won the 1988 Tony Award for Best Play for M. Butterfly, becoming the first Asian American playwright honored with the prize. His works include Yellow Face, Chinglish and Soft Power, along with Broadway librettos for Aida and the revival of Flower Drum Song; he has long led the playwriting program at Columbia University.

Taking OpenAI and Meta to court

In September 2023, Hwang joined Michael Chabon, Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder and Ayelet Waldman as named plaintiffs in class actions against OpenAI (filed September 8 in the Northern District of California) and Meta (filed September 12). The suits alleged direct and vicarious copyright infringement, DMCA violations, unjust enrichment and negligence, and sought destruction of AI models trained on the class’s books and scripts. As evidence, the OpenAI complaint described ChatGPT producing a screenplay in Hwang’s style when prompted with his play The Dance and the Railroad — a script about a Chinese laborer on the Central Pacific Railroad.

The Meta claims were consolidated into Kadrey v. Meta alongside plaintiffs such as Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates. On June 26, 2025, Judge Vince Chhabria granted Meta summary judgment against the thirteen named authors, Hwang among them — while writing that the ruling “does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” and stressing it affected only those thirteen plaintiffs.

Hwang has said little publicly about AI outside the litigation; his opposition is expressed through the courtroom, where the consolidated authors’ cases against OpenAI continue.