A class-action lawsuit has been filed in a US federal court challenging the legality of GitHub Copilot and the related OpenAI Codex. The suit against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI claims violation of open-source licenses and could have a wide impact in the world of artificial intelligence.
GitHub previewed Copilot, an OpenAI-powered coding assistant, in the summer of 2021 and announced its general availability last July. Powered by the artificial intelligence model OpenAI Codex, the service is a cloud-based tool to assist developers in writing new code by analyzing existing code and comments on GitHub.