Tag: lawsuit

Insight Partners sued by former vice president Kate Lowry

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Kate Lowry, a former vice president at Insight Partners, is suing the firm, alleging disability discrimination, gender discrimination, and wrongful termination, according to a suit filed on December 30 in San Mateo County, California, and seen by TechCrunch.  
 
Insight Partners did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. 

Lowry told TechCrunch she filed the suit because she believes “too many powerful, wealthy people in venture act like it’s OK to break the law and systemically underpay and abuse their employees.”

“It’s an oppressive system that reflect[s] broader trends in society that use fear, intimidation, and power to silence and isolate truth. I’m trying to change that.”

Lowry began working at Insight Partners in 2022, after previously working for Meta, McKinsey & Company, and an early-stage startup. The suit alleges that, upon being hired, she was assigned to a different supervisor than the person mentioned during her interview.  

She alleges in the suit that she was told by her new supervisor, who was a woman, to be “online all the time, including PTO, holidays, and weekends,” and to respond between “6 a.m. and 11 p.m. daily.”  

Lowry says in the suit that this first supervisor “berated, hazed, and antagonized” her, spoke openly about a hazing that would be “longer and more intense” than what she put other male reports through.  

Some comments the supervisor allegedly made, according to the suit, include “you are incompetent, shut up and take notes” and “you need to obey me like a dog; do whatever I say whenever I say it, without speaking.”  Lowry also alleges that her supervisor assigned her “redundant tasks” and restricted her ability to participate in calls, while allowing less experienced male colleagues to do so. Lowry, instead, she alleges, was relegated to “administrative tasks such as note-taking and cataloging.”  

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Lowry said she became “increasingly ill” because of the work environment and that her physician advised a medical leave of absence, which she was granted and took from February to July 2023.  

When she returned to work, she was placed on a new team and, the suit alleges, was told by the head of human resources that “if the new team did not like her, she would be fired.”  

In September 2023, Lowry said she got a concussion and took another medical leave and returned to work near the end of 2024. Due to some departures, she was placed under the supervision of a new person, where Lowry said her poor treatment continued. She also alleges that in 2024, her compensation was about 30% below the market. 

By April 2025, she alleges she was told her compensation would be cut. In May of 2025, through her attorneys, Lowry sent a letter to Insight regarding her alleged treatment by the company. A week later, the firm terminated her employment, the suit states.  

The lawsuit is reminiscent of Ellen Pao’s suit against Kleiner Perkins back in 2012, in which she alleged discrimination and retaliation. That suit offered what was, at the time, a rare glimpse into how women partners felt they were treated in venture capital. Though Pao lost that suit, it sent waves through the industry, and other women went on to sue major tech companies.  

Rippling spy says men have been following him, and his wife is afraid

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If becoming a spy sounds like an exciting way to live like a le Carré character, let this newest affidavit from confessed Rippling spy Keith O’Brien serve as a warning.

On Friday, an Irish judge granted O’Brien a restraining order against several men who have not yet been identified, according to the court order seen by TechCrunch. O’Brien testified that multiple men — two in a gray Skoda Superb on one occasion, and more often, a short-haired, heavy-set man in a black SUV, sometimes accompanied by a large dog — had repeatedly followed his car and watched his home.

O’Brien’s story has captured the imagination of the tech industry after his colorful confession in April, in which he alleged that he was a spy for Deel. He said he was paid €5,000 a month to steal Rippling’s internal data on everything from products to customers. Rippling caught him by setting up a honeypot Slack channel. On the day he was caught, O’Brien pretended to flush his phone down the corporate toilet and later smashed it, dropping pieces down the drain at his mother-in-law’s house, according to his affidavit. 

Now he’s the star witness for Rippling in its lawsuit against Deel. Rippling is even picking up the tab for his legal and related expenses, its lawyers testified. Deel is also countersuing Rippling, claiming it was spied on too, by a Rippling employee impersonating a customer. The two HR tech companies have been bitter rivals for years after Deel — once a Rippling customer — began offering competing products. 

In the latest part of the saga, O’Brien testified that he tried to lose the black SUV following his car by making sudden turns and taking roundabout ways to get home, only to see it reappear in his rearview mirror. He hired a security consulting company and feared that someone was placing tracking devices on his car.

O’Brien claims all of these incidents have created “emotional and psychological” damage for himself and his wife. “We have been experiencing anxiety at home and in public. It has affected our sleep and our concentration,” O’Brien said in his latest affidavit. They are fearful for the safety of their four children.

He and his lawyer speculated that this was intended as harassment related to his role as star witness. However, O’Brien’s lawyer also admitted in court that they had no evidence tying the men to Deel. Deel also denied knowing anything about the man in the black SUV.

According to the Irish publication Business Post, when granting the injunction, the judge apparently said, “As if they are in a 1970s cops and robbers” TV show. 

Whatever happens in the dueling court cases, O’Brien has made himself the rope in a bitter tug of war between these two well-funded HR startups. And from what he says in his testimony, it sounds painful.

Key ex-OpenAI researcher subpoenaed in AI copyright case

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Alec Radford, a researcher who helped develop many of OpenAI’s key AI technologies, has been subpoenaed in a copyright case against the AI startup, according to a court filing Tuesday.

The filing, submitted by an attorney for the plaintiffs to the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California, indicated that Radford was served a subpoena on February 25.

Radford, who left OpenAI late last year to pursue independent research, was the lead author of OpenAI’s seminal research paper on generative pre-trained transformers (GPTs). GPTs underpin OpenAI’s most popular products, including the company’s AI-powered chatbot platform, ChatGPT.

Radford joined OpenAI in 2016, a year after the firm’s founding. He worked on several models in the company’s GPT series, as well as a speech recognition model, Whisper, and DALL-E, the company’s image-generating model.

The copyright case, “re OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation,” was brought by book authors including Paul Tremblay, Sarah Silverman, and Michael Chabon, who alleged that OpenAI infringed their copyrights by using their work to train its AI models. The plaintiffs also argued that ChatGPT infringed their works by liberally quoting those works sans attribution.

Last year, the Court dismissed two of the plaintiffs’ claims against OpenAI, but allowed the claim for direct infringement to move forward. OpenAI maintains its use of copyrighted data for training is protected under fair use.

Redford isn’t the only high-profile figure who attorneys for the authors are attempting to wrangle. Plaintiffs’ lawyers have also moved to compel the deposition of Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann, both ex-OpenAI employees who left the company to start Anthropic. Amodei and Mann have fought the motions, claiming they’re overly burdensome.

A U.S. magistrate judge ruled this week that Amodei must sit for hours of questioning about the work he did for OpenAI in two copyright cases, including a case filed by the Authors Guild.

X adds Twitch to its advertising boycott lawsuit

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Twitch is now on the docket for X’s lawsuit against companies that stopped advertising on the social media site. X amended its lawsuit on Monday to include Twitch as a defendant in its lawsuit in a federal court in Wichita Falls, Texas, according to Reuters.

The new complaint claims that the gaming stream site owned by Amazon stopped purchasing ads on X at the end of 2022. X alleges that Twitch and other companies conspired with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) network’s Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative to withhold “billions of dollars in advertising revenue” from Elon Musk’s social media company.

The plaintiff alleges the boycott violated federal antitrust laws and is demanding a jury trial to settle the matter. GARM also announced its discontinuation two days after X filed its lawsuit.

X Corp.’s joint lawsuit first filed in August also includes the WFA, the global food manufacturer Mars Incorporated, the drugstore chain CVS and the Danish energy company Ørsted A/S over the advertising boycott. X also has a lawsuit against the media watchdog group Media Matters for publishing a report showing X displayed ads next to antisemitic content on the platform.

Musk’s amended lawsuit against OpenAI names Microsoft as defendant

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Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI accusing the company of abandoning its non-profit mission was withdrawn in July, only to be revived in August. Now, in an amended complaint, the suit names new defendants including Microsoft, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and former OpenAI board member and Microsoft VP Dee Templeton.

The amended filing also adds new plaintiffs: Neuralink exec and ex-OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis and Musk’s AI company, xAI.

Musk was one of the original founders of OpenAI, which was meant to research and develop AI for the benefit of humanity, and was established as a non-profit originally. He left the company in 2018 after disagreements about its direction.

In the complaint, lawyers for Musk argue that OpenAI is now “actively trying to eliminate competitors” such as xAI by “extracting promises from investors not to fund them.” It’s also allegedly unfairly benefitting from Microsoft’s infrastructure and expertise in what Musk’s counsel describes in the filing as a “de facto merger.”

“xAI has been harmed by, without limitation … an inability to obtain compute from Microsoft on terms anywhere near as favorable as OpenAI receives … and the exclusive exchange between OpenAI and Microsoft of competitively sensitive information,” reads the complaint, filed late Thursday in federal court in Oakland, California.

Hoffman’s position on the boards of both Microsoft and OpenAI while also a partner at Greylock, the investment firm, gave Hoffman a privileged — and illicit — view into the companies’ dealings, the complaint alleges. (Hoffman stepped down from OpenAI’s board in 2023.) Greylock invested in Inflection, Musk’s counsel notes, the AI startup that Microsoft acqui-hired earlier this year — and which could reasonably be considered an OpenAI competitor, according to the complaint.

As for Templeton, whom Microsoft briefly appointed as a non-voting board observer at OpenAI, the amended filing alleges that she was in a position to facilitate agreements between Microsoft and OpenAI that would violate antitrust rules.

“The purpose of the prohibition on interlocking directorates is to prevent sharing of competitively sensitive information in violation of antitrust laws and/or providing a forum for the coordination of other anticompetitive activity,” the complaint reads. “Allowing Templeton and Hoffman to serve as members of OpenAI’s …. board undermined this purpose. “

Alongside Microsoft, Hoffman, and Templeton, California attorney general Rob Bonta is named as a defendant in Musk’s complaint. Bloomberg reported this month that OpenAI is in talks with Bonta’s office over the process to change its corporate structure.

Per the amended complaint, Zilis, who stepped down from OpenAI’s board in 2023 after serving as a member for roughly four years, has standing as an “injured employee” under California Corporations Code. Zilis repeatedly raised concerns over OpenAI’s dealmaking internally that fell on deaf ears — concerns substantially similar to Musk’s, according to the complaint.

Zilis has close ties to Musk, having worked as a project director at Tesla from 2017 to 2019 in addition to directing Neuralink research. (Neuralink is Musk’s brain-computer interface venture.) She’s also the mother of three of Musk’s children, Techno Mechanicus and twins Strider and Azure.

The 107-page amended complaint includes the unusual detail that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman proposed that OpenAI sell its own cryptocurrency in January 2018, before it ultimately decided to transition to a capped-profit structure.

“Heads up, spoke to some of the safety team and there were a lot of concerns about the ICO and possible unintended effects in the future,” Altman wrote in an email to Musk dated January 21, 2018, an exhibit filed with the amended complaint shows. An ICO, or initial coin offering, is an unregulated means by which funds are raised for cryptocurrency businesses. “Going to emphasize the need to keep this confidential, but I think it’s really important we get buy-in and give people the chance to weigh in early.”

Musk v OpenAI crypto ICO Altman email
Image Credits:Toberoff & Associates

Musk supposedly shot down the crypto sale idea. “I have considered the ICO approach and will not support it,” he wrote in an email reply to Altman and OpenAI co-founders Greg Brockman (now OpenAI’s president) and Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI’s ex-chief scientist), shows an exhibit. “In my opinion, that would simply result in a massive loss of credibility for OpenAI and everyone associated with the ICO.”

The thrust of the lawsuit remains the same on the plaintiffs’ side: that OpenAI profited from Musk’s early involvement in the company yet reneged on its nonprofit pledge to make the fruits of its AI research available to all. “No amount of clever drafting nor surfeit of creative dealmaking can obscure what is happening here,” reads the complaint. “OpenAI, Inc., co-founded by Musk as an independent charity committed to safety and transparency … [is] fast becoming a full for-profit subsidiary of Microsoft.”

OpenAI has sought to dismiss Musk’s lawsuit, calling it “blusterous” and baseless.

Musk’s amended lawsuit against OpenAI names Microsoft as defendent

Posted on by faz_business


Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI accusing the company of abandoning its nonprofit mission was withdrawn in July, only to be revived in August. Now, in an amended complaint, the suit names new defendants including Microsoft, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and former OpenAI board member and Microsoft VP Dee Templeton.

The amended filing also adds new plaintiffs: Neuralink exec and ex-OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis and Musk’s AI company, xAI.

Musk was one of the original founders of OpenAI, which was meant to research and develop AI for the benefit of humanity, and was established as a non-profit originally. He left the company in 2018 after disagreements about its direction.

In the complaint, lawyers for Musk argue that OpenAI is now “actively trying to eliminate competitors” such as xAI by “extracting promises from investors not to fund them.” It’s also allegedly unfairly benefitting from Microsoft’s infrastructure and expertise in what Musk’s counsel describes in the filing as a “de facto” merger.

“xAI has been harmed by, without limitation … an inability to license OpenAI technology given Microsoft’s exclusive license … an inability to obtain compute from Microsoft on terms anywhere near as favorable as OpenAI receives … and the exclusive exchange between OpenAI and Microsoft of competitively sensitive information.”

Hoffman’s position on the boards of both Microsoft and OpenAI while also a partner at Greylock, the investment firm, gave Hoffman a privileged — and illicit — view into the companies’ dealings, the complaint alleges. (Hoffman stepped down from OpenAI’s board in 2023.) Greylock invested in Inflection, Musk’s counsel notes, the AI startup that Microsoft acqui-hired earlier this year — and which could reasonably be considered an OpenAI competitor, according to the complaint.

As for Templeton, whom Microsoft briefly appointed as a non-voting board observer at OpenAI, the amended filing alleges that she was in a position to facilitate agreements between Microsoft and OpenAI that would violate antitrust rules.

“The purpose of the prohibition on interlocking directorates is to prevent sharing of competitively sensitive information in violation of antitrust laws and/or providing a forum for the coordination of other anticompetitive activity,” the complaint reads. “Allowing Templeton and Hoffman to serve as members of OpenAI’s …. board undermined this purpose. “

Per the amended complaint, Zilis, who stepped down from OpenAI’s board in 2023 after serving as a member for roughly four years, has standing as an “injured employee” under California Corporations Code. Zilis repeatedly raised concerns over OpenAI’s dealmaking internally that fell on deaf ears — concerns substantially similar to Musk’s, according to the complaint.

Zilis has close ties to Musk, having worked as a project director at Tesla from 2017 to 2019 in addition to directing Neuralink research. (Neuralink is Musk’s brain-computer interface venture.) She’s also the mother of three of Musk’s children, Techno Mechanicus and twins Strider and Azure.

The 107-page amended complaint includes the unusual detail that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman proposed that OpenAI sell its own cryptocurrency in September 2017, before it ultimately decided to transition to a capped-profit structure. Musk supposedly shot down the crypto sale idea.

The thrust of the lawsuit remains the same on the plaintiffs’ side: that OpenAI profited from Musk’s early involvement in the company yet reneged on its nonprofit pledge to make the fruits of its AI research available to all. “No amount of clever drafting nor surfeit of creative dealmaking can obscure what is happening here,” reads the complaint. “OpenAI, Inc., co-founded by Musk as an independent charity committed to safety and transparency … [is] fast becoming a full for-profit subsidiary of Microsoft.”

Judge denies Media Matters’ motion to dismiss X’s not-libel lawsuit

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A Texas judge denied Media Matters for America’s request for a dismissal on Thursday allowing X’s lawsuit over alleged anti-semitic and racist content. The Verge reported that Northern District of Texas Judge Reed O’Connor dismissed the request for a dismissal paving the way for X’s lawsuit against Media Matters to continue.

Media Matters submitted its dismissal request in early March on the grounds that X’s case lacked “personal jurisdiction,” an “improper venue” and the “failure to state a claim.” O’Connor dismissed all of those claims, according to court records.

The lawsuit filed last year in federal court seeks damages from the media watchdog group over “maliciously manufactured” images reporting that X’s platform placed Neo-Nazi and white-nationlist content next to advertisers’ images causing advertisers to flee the site. The images Media Matters used weren’t manufactured but X’s claim is that its dogged pursuit of ads’ placement with racist content by using certain accounts to bypass ad filters caused irreparable harm to the social media giant.

X owner Elon Musk’s other companies are located in Texas but aren’t directly connected to the Media Matters lawsuit. X closed its San Francisco offices earlier this month and owner Elon Musk announced in July that X’s headquarters will move to Austin. Tesla moved its headquarters from California to the Lone Star State in 2021 and SpaceX from Delaware earlier this year when a judge threw out a $56 billion pay package from the state.

However, in dismissing the personal jurisdiction argument, O’Connor noted that two of X’s “blue-chip” advertisers like AT&T and Oracle included in Media Matters’ coverage are based in Texas. He cited the landmark 2002 Internet defamation case Revell v. Lidov quoting the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’ assertion that “if you are going to pick a fight in Texas, it is reasonable to expect that it be settled there.”

Justice Department sues RealPage over allegedly helping landlords collude to drive up rents

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RealPage, which makes property management software, was sued Friday by the U.S. Justice Department and eight attorneys general for allegedly helping apartment and building managers around the country collude to drive up unit prices.

The Richardson, Texas-based outfit is accused of contracting with rival landlords to absorb info about their rates and lease terms to train RealPage’s recommendation algorithms, and in the process discouraging competition among property owners who defer to the company’s recommendations on pricing and other terms.

It’s the DOJ’s first big algorithmic collusion case and comes as rent in the U.S. skyrockets, climbing 33% since March 2020, according to Zillow.

RealPage, which was acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo in 2021 for $10.2 billion, commands 80% of the market for commercial revenue management software for conventional multi-family housing rentals in the U.S., according to the lawsuit. The company denies any wrongdoing.