An attorney advising Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is slamming a New York Times report last week that claimed the Trump HHS secretary nominee sought to revoke the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) approval for the polio vaccine.

"Contrary to hysterical media reports that the petition sought to make sure no polio vaccines would be available, the scope of the petition was quite narrow," Aaron Siri, a close RFK Jr. adviser and partner at Siri & Glimstad LLP, told Fox News Digital. "It simply asked the FDA to require a proper trial for licensure for children of a novel polio vaccine."

The New York Times reported Friday that Siri is "waging a war" against all vaccines, but Siri said the report "falsely claimed the petition sought to eliminate" the polio vaccine, "as if there is only one, and that our client sought to leave Americans without the choice to get vaccinated for polio." 

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"In reality, the petition sought to ensure the safety of one of the six existing licensed polio vaccines that we inject into our children three times before their first birthday," he said.

The report came just days before RFK Jr. headed to Capitol Hill this week to meet with Senators, seeking support for his HHS confirmation.

The petition, filed in 2022 on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN) and not as an individual action by Siri, urged the FDA to suspend the polio vaccine IPOL for infants and children. ICAN's request stems from concerns that IPOL, licensed in 1990 by Sanofi, was approved based on pediatric trials that, according to the FDA, evaluated safety for only three days after injection.

This is not the traditional polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk or Albert Sabin that many people are familiar with, Siri added. Instead, it is a product utilizing a different technology, where the polio virus is grown on monkey kidney cells that have been genetically altered to replicate indefinitely, similar to cancer cells. Traces of these cells are present in each vaccine dose.

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Another petition filed on behalf of ICAN in 2021 addresses 13 childhood vaccines containing aluminum adjuvants. According to the petition, a peer-reviewed study found discrepancies between the aluminum levels in these vaccines and the amounts listed on their FDA-approved labels. The petition calls on the FDA to verify and publicly release documentation proving the accuracy of the aluminum content or halt distribution until resolved — an issue critics say should not be controversial for products injected into infants.

"Currently, political labeling (pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine) is inadequate to encompass the realities of medical ethics, regulatory capture, and the influence of corporate money on health policy," Siri said. "We must be able to raise valid questions about vaccine safety, efficacy and policy without fear that any deviation from the mantra 'safe and effective' will be smeared with epithets and outrage."

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In the days since media outlets have reported about Siri's petition, both Trump and RFK Jr. have said they support the polio vaccine, without specifying which one. RFK Jr. has expressed his skepticism of some vaccines, while supporting the use of others, in interviews during his 2024 presidential campaign run as part of his "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) slogan. 

"Mr. Kennedy believes the Polio Vaccine should be available to the public and thoroughly and properly studied," Katie Miller, the transition spokeswoman for Kennedy, said in response. 

Meanwhile, Trump said "everything should be looked at," adding that he's a "big believer in the polio vaccine," during a Mar-a-Lago press conference Monday morning. 

Fox News Digital reached out to the New York Times for comment but did not receive an immediate reply.

• Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI researcher, died by suicide late last month.
• After he left the company, Balaji raised questions about OpenAI possibly violating copyright law.
• His name appears in a New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI that could have far-reaching implications.

Eight days before the former OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji was found dead in a San Francisco apartment, the 26-year-old's name appeared in a lawsuit against his former employer that could have significant implications for the future of AI and the internet.

The lawsuit — filed by The New York Times last December — accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using "millions" of articles published by the newspaper without permission to train the AI startup's popular ChatGPT model. The companies have denied that they violated copyright law.

On November 18, the Times' attorneys asked a judge to add Balaji as a "custodian" in the lawsuit, according to court documents viewed by Business Insider. The attorneys' letter described Balaji as someone with "unique and relevant documents" that could support their copyright infringement case against OpenAI and Microsoft.

Other custodians proposed by the Times include former OpenAI employees such as cofounder Ilya Sutskever. Sutskever's potential contribution to the lawsuit is redacted in the court documents.

The Times' legal case is one of several copyright lawsuits filed against the AI startup after ChatGPT was released in 2022.

If the courts were to side with the Times or other news outlets and authors who have filed a lawsuit, the result could be costly for AI companies and limit the already finite data used to train models.

The Times' lawsuit doesn't demand an exact monetary figure but says OpenAI and Microsoft are responsible for "billions of dollars" in damages.

Spokespeople for OpenAI, Microsoft, and The New York Times did not respond to requests for comment.

Balaji raised concerns over OpenAI's use of copyrighted data

Balaji joined OpenAI in 2020 and worked on training the ChatGPT and GPT-4 models, court documents and reporting from The New York Times show. The researcher, who said OpenAI's work violated copyright law, left the company in August "because he no longer wanted to contribute to technologies that he believed would bring society more harm than benefit," the Times reported.

On October 23, he published an essay on his personal website raising questions about whether OpenAI's use of copyrighted data could be considered fair use.

"While generative models rarely produce outputs that are substantially similar to any of their training inputs, the process of training a generative model involves making copies of copyrighted data," Balaji wrote. "If these copies are unauthorized, this could potentially be considered copyright infringement, depending on whether or not the specific use of the model qualifies as 'fair use.' Because fair use is determined on a case-by-case basis, no broad statement can be made about when generative AI qualifies for fair use."

That same day, the Times published a profile of the former OpenAI researcher.

"If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company," he told the Times.

On November 26, eight days after Balaji's name appeared in the Times' attorney's letter, officers from the San Francisco Police Department responded to a welfare check at a Lower Haight-area apartment around 1:15 p.m.

"Officers and medics arrived on scene and located a deceased adult male from what appeared to be a suicide," an SFPD spokesperson told BI. "No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation."

The office of the city's chief medical examiner later identified the deceased male as Balaji.

"The manner of death has been determined to be suicide," David Serrano Sewell, executive director of the city's office of the chief medical examiner, told BI. He did not provide further comment.

"We are devastated to learn of this incredibly sad news today and our hearts go out to Suchir's loved ones during this difficult time," an OpenAI spokesperson told BI when reached for comment on Friday.

• Jeff Bezos prefers "messy" meetings to rehearsed ones for genuine discussions.
• Bezos emphasized seeking truth in meetings, not polished pitches or presentations.
• His ideal meetings include six-page memos, a study period, and open, messy discussions.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos prefers "messy" meetings to ones that team members have rehearsed, he told The New York Times DealBook Summit last week.

The world's second-richest person and owner of the Washington Post said his approach to internal meetings is to not finish them until he feels that everything has been discussed.

"Messy is good," Bezos told The New York Times.

Bezos explained that most of the meetings he considers useful have six-page memos, a 30-minute "study hall" period to read them, and then a messy discussion.

"I like the memos to be like angels singing from on high, so clear and beautiful," he said. "And then the meeting can be messy."

Bezos said that internal presentations should be about seeking the truth — not pitches to him or any senior executive.

"You don't want the whole thing to be figured out and presented to you," he said, adding that he would prefer to be part of the "sausage-making" process.

"I'm very skeptical if the meeting's not messy," he said.

"Show me the ugly bits. I always ask, are there any dissenting opinions on the team? I want to try to get to the controversy," Bezos said.

"Let's make this meeting messy. Help me make it messy."

Bezos is well known for his strong views about how meetings should be run, particularly what has become known "two-pizza rule," where a meeting is limited to the number of people that could be fed with two large pizzas. He also dislikes the use of PowerPoints in company meetings.

• The Times is one of several media organizations that have sued OpenAI for copyright infringement.
• A judge denied OpenAI's request for information on how the Times uses AI.
• The judge used an analogy to a video game company to explain her decision.

The New York Times sued OpenAI in December, arguing that the company used its articles without permission to train ChatGPT.

The case is now in the discovery phase, where both sides gather and exchange evidence before the trial. As part of that, OpenAI requested to know more about how the Times uses generative AI, including its use of generative AI tools from other companies, any AI tools it's developing for its reporting, and its views on the technology.

Judge Ona T. Wang rejected that request on Friday, calling it irrelevant. She then offered an analogy to explain her decision, comparing OpenAI to a video game manufacturer and the Times to a copyright holder.

If a copyright holder sued a video game manufacturer for copyright infringement, the copyright holder might be required to produce documents relating to their interactions with that video game manufacturer, but the video game manufacturer would not be entitled to wide-ranging discovery concerning the copyright holder's employees' gaming history, statements about video games generally, or even their licensing of different content to other video game Manufacturers.

In the same case, legal filings revealed earlier this month that OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted evidence that Times lawyers had gathered from their servers. Lawyers for the outlet spent over 150 hours searching through OpenAI's training data for instances of infringement, which they stored on virtual machines the company created. The majority of the data has been recovered, and the Times lawyer said there is no reason to believe it was "intentional."

The case is one among dozens of copyright cases filed against OpenAI, including by media organizations like the New York Daily News, the Denver Post, and The Intercept. Some of these cases have already been dismissed. Earlier this month a federal judge dismissed cases from Raw Story and AlterNet, because the outlets did not demonstrate "concrete" harm from OpenAI's actions.

OpenAI is also facing lawsuits from authors, including one involving comedian Sarah Silverman. Silverman and over a dozen authors filed an initial complaint against OpenAI in 2023, saying the tech company illegally used their books to train ChatGPT.

"Much of the material in OpenAI's training datasets, however, comes from copyrighted works — including books written by Plaintiffs — that were copied by OpenAI without consent, without credit, and without compensation," the complaint says.

OpenAI's website says the company develops ChatGPT and its other services using three sources: publicly available information online, information accessed by partnering with third parties, and information provided or generated by its users, researchers, or human trainers.

Silverman, who authored "The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee," discussed the ongoing legal dispute with actor Rob Lowe on his SiriusXM podcast. She said taking on OpenAI will be "tough."

"They are the richest entities in the world, and we live in a country where that's considered a person that can influence, practically create policy, let alone influence it," she said.

Some media organizations, including Axel Springer, the parent company of Business Insider, have chosen to partner with OpenAI, licensing their content in deals worth tens of millions of dollars.

OpenAI and the Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• The New York Times and other newspapers are in a legal battle with OpenAI over using their content.
• Lawyers for the newspapers are searching OpenAI's training data as part of a discovering process.
• OpenAI accidentally just deleted all the lawyer's work.

An unusual setback has happened in a lawsuit against OpenAI: the company just deleted a bunch of work by the lawyers representing its opposition.

The lawsuit was filed by a group of news organizations including The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune. It accuses OpenAI of using their articles for training and violating their copyrights.

Lawyers for the news organizations have been inspecting OpenAI's training data under a tightly controlled discovery process involving computers without an internet connection.

According to legal filings, there was a snafu last week.

"Since November 1, 2024, the News Plantifs have spent over 150 person-hours searching OpenAI's training data for instances of the News Plaintiff's Asserted Works. The News Plaintiffs stored the results of their searches on two dedicated virtual machines provided by OpenAI," said a filing reviewed by Business Insider.

"On November 14, 2024, the News Plaintiffs learned OpenAI's engineers erased all of the News Plaintiff's programs and search result data that was stored on one of the dedicated virtual machines."

It went on to say that OpenAI had been able to recover some of the data, but not the file structure or file names, which lawyers said made it essentially useless.

It's unclear how the data on the server got erased, but in a second legal filing, a lawyer for the newspapers said that they "have no reason to believe was intentional." (Hey, who among us hasn't accidentally deleted something important?)

Newspaper lawyers are asking the judge to have OpenAI repeat their searches so that they don't have to redo all their (costly) work.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.