- Former Amazon executive Vivian Gadeli is suing the company, alleging fraud and discrimination.
- She said her boss told her to ignore legal advice to limit the materials Amazon AI models could use.
- Ghaderi also claimed that Amazon demoted her for taking maternity leave.
A former Amazon executive has accused the company of directing the company to violate copyright laws to compete with other tech giants in the AI ​​field.
Vivian Gadeli filed a lawsuit against Amazon in Los Angeles Superior Court, claiming she was discriminated against and ultimately fired.
The complaint, dated April 16, was reported earlier this week by The Register, which published the full document.
Ghaderi said he was tasked with pointing out possible violations of the law in the way Amazon develops LLMs (Large-Scale Language Models).
(LLM is a text generation service like Open AI's ChatGPT or Google's Bard.)
The complaint alleges that Gaderi's boss, Andrei Sutiskin, instructed her to ignore legal advice and Amazon's own policies to get a better outcome.
From the complaint:
Steiskin dismissed Ghadelli's concerns about Amazon's internal policies, saying that “other companies” – other AI companies – are “doing” those policies in pursuit of better outcomes. I told her to ignore it.
The allegations about Amazon's AI efforts stem from a larger case in which Ghaderi claims she was demoted and ultimately fired for taking maternity leave.
In a statement to Business Insider, Amazon spokesperson Montana McLachlan did not directly address Gadelli's claims.
She said Amazon “does not tolerate discrimination, harassment, or retaliation in the workplace” and will investigate allegations and punish wrongdoing.
Ghaderi said she complained to the human resources department, which largely rejected her claims and ultimately fired her.
BI also sent messages to Ghaderi and other Amazon employees named in the complaint, but did not immediately receive a response.
Ghaderi's lawsuit alleges that Amazon violated California law protecting whistleblowers and a statute that makes pregnancy discrimination illegal.
Her lawyers said in the complaint that Amazon's rush to compete in AI has made employees like her “collateral damage in the battle for the future of the technology industry.”
Ghaderi's LinkedIn says she worked at Amazon until January 2024, but the complaint says she was fired on November 17, 2023.
Ghaderi does not appear to have talked about leaving Amazon outside of the lawsuit.
Although Ghaderi's case has not yet been heard in court, the frenzy of AI product development in Silicon Valley is well documented.
The rush also extended to Amazon. In November 2023, Business Insider's Eugene Kim reported that the company was rushing to launch new AI products on par with Microsoft.
AI developments are pushing the boundaries of copyright law as tech companies and publishers battle over ownership and usage of the vast amounts of text that AI models ingest.
Some publishers claim they are owed billions of dollars because tech companies use their works.
The New York Times is pursuing a landmark lawsuit against OpenAI, saying it owes a huge debt to OpenAI for using its content to train ChatGPT.
Some companies take a different approach. BI's parent company, Axel Springer, has signed a deal with OpenAI that allows it to use its articles.