Julian Sancton
Journalist & Nonfiction Author
Hollywood Reporter senior editor and author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth who filed the first authors’ copyright suit to name Microsoft alongside OpenAI, leading a class action for nonfiction writers.
In his words
OpenAI and Microsoft have built a business valued into the tens of billions of dollars by taking the combined works of humanity without permission.
Biography
Julian Sancton is a senior features editor at The Hollywood Reporter and the author of Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic (2021), a New York Times bestseller about an 1897 polar expedition trapped through a sunless Antarctic winter. He spent five years and tens of thousands of dollars of his own money researching the book.
The nonfiction writers’ class action
On November 21, 2023, Sancton filed a class action in the Southern District of New York on behalf of nonfiction authors — the first author suit to name Microsoft as a defendant alongside OpenAI, arguing Microsoft bankrolled and profited from training that copied authors’ books without permission. His complaint noted that early versions of ChatGPT, when asked, confirmed that Madhouse at the End of the Earth was in its training data — and that the chatbot was later modified to stop divulging such details.
On December 19, 2023, Sancton amended the complaint to add twelve co-plaintiffs, including Pulitzer Prize winners Kai Bird, Taylor Branch and Stacy Schiff, as well as Jia Tolentino and Simon Winchester. The suit, backed by the The Authors Guild, seeks damages and an injunction, and proceeds in the consolidated OpenAI copyright litigation in New York.
The commercial success of the ChatGPT products for OpenAI and Microsoft comes at the expense of nonfiction authors who haven’t seen a penny from either defendant.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/julian-sancton