OpenAI accused of sending cops to critics’ doors amid Musk lawsuit

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OpenAI is now being accused of sending the cops to someone’s doorstep. The alleged reason? Advocating for AI regulation.

Nathan Calvin, a lawyer at Encode AI (a nonprofit focused on AI policy), says a sheriff’s deputy showed up one Tuesday night while he was eating dinner, serving him a subpoena from OpenAI. 

The company, Calvin claims, wanted his private messages with California lawmakers, students, and former OpenAI employees. 

“I believe OpenAI used the pretext of their lawsuit against Elon Musk to intimidate their critics,” Calvin wrote on X, adding that it felt like a scare tactic to suggest Musk was secretly behind every OpenAI critic on Earth.

One Tuesday night, as my wife and I sat down for dinner, a sheriff’s deputy knocked on the door to serve me a subpoena from OpenAI.

I held back on talking about it because I didn't want to distract from SB 53, but Newsom just signed the bill so… here's what happened:
🧵 pic.twitter.com/VnYCJYg2DH

— Nathan Calvin (@_NathanCalvin) October 10, 2025

Here’s the backstory: OpenAI is currently in a legal spat with Elon Musk, who co-founded the company and later sued them, claiming they’ve drifted from their original nonprofit mission. 

In response, OpenAI has been countersuing, and along the way, it subpoenaed Encode AI, asking whether the group gets funding from Musk. 

It also reportedly subpoenaed Meta about Musk’s $97.4 billion takeover bid.

Encode has been vocal about AI safety and transparency, even helping to push California’s landmark AI regulation bill (SB 53), which was signed into law in September. 

So yeah, not exactly Musk’s shadow army. Calvin says the timing of the subpoena, during the bill’s debate, felt like intimidation. 

“This is not normal,” he wrote, adding he didn’t hand over the requested documents.

When asked for comment, OpenAI pointed to a post by its strategy chief, Aaron Kwon, who said the goal was to “understand why Encode joined Elon’s legal challenge.” (Via: The Verge)

He added that deputies sometimes moonlight as process servers, as if that made the dinner-time subpoena feel any less dystopian.

Meanwhile, The Midas Project, another AI watchdog, says it got a similar subpoena demanding a list of everyone it’s ever talked to about OpenAI. 

Even some inside OpenAI aren’t thrilled, Joshua Achiam, head of mission alignment, admitted on X: “This doesn’t seem great.” When your own ethics chief thinks you’re the bad guy, maybe it’s time to log off.