The U.S. government wants to prove that Google's rivals face overwhelming barriers to entry as part of its antitrust case against the tech giant. So the company asked Nick Turley, ChaptGPT's head of product, to testify as a witness in the hope that he could help strengthen its case.
Last August, the court issued a landmark ruling that Google had a monopoly in search. While Google is appealing the decision, the Justice Department is now asking the court to decide what penalties it should face, such as spinning off Chrome or being banned from releasing any browser products for 10 years.
To support its claims, the Justice Department has included Google competitors such as OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity. It wants certain executives, including Perplexity chief commercial officer Dmitry Shevelenko, to testify. (It’s unclear whether Shevelenko will do so. Perplexity did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Recent legal filings confirm that Nick Turley, an OpenAI executive and product lead for ChatGPT, will testify as a witness in the U.S. government case.
"Mr. Turley was a hand-picked witness by the plaintiff (DOJ) to testify on behalf of OpenAI," Google lawyers wrote in a January 16 legal filing.
"Mr. Turley is a witness for OpenAI who will testify on behalf of the government at the evidentiary hearing," another filing from January 16 reads.
None of the documents specify when Turley testified. The U.S. is expected to ask Turley about "generative AI's relationship to search access points, distribution, barriers to entry and expansion, and data sharing," according to the document. The Justice Department has not yet provided details about where Turley will be questioned. (These are exactly the topics it wants to ask Perplexity's CBO.)
The DOJ uses the term "search access point" to refer to products like Google Chrome that people use to search the web. It is worth noting that in October 2024, ChatGPT launched its own artificial intelligence search browser.
In preparation for Turley's testimony, Google has issued a subpoena to OpenAI, requesting it to provide documents related to the case. But the two companies are currently in a heated dispute over the scope of evidence OpenAI should provide.
In a legal filing on January 16, Google criticized OpenAI for producing "astonishingly little documentation." Lawyers for OpenAI fired back, pointing out that Google's request for documents from executives such as CEO Sam Altman appeared to be a "Trojan horse designed to harass OpenAI executives."
A letter from OpenAI's attorney shows that OpenAI has agreed to share documents from Turley's work files related to OpenAI's artificial intelligence product strategy, integrating artificial intelligence into search-related products, and its partnership with Microsoft.
Google said it needed more documents from more executives because relying primarily on Turley, who was a "handpicked" witness for the U.S. government, "would be detrimental to Google's interests," according to the filing.
Google also wants to obtain OpenAI's documents from before it launched ChatGPT in November 2022, claiming that the documents "could undermine Mr. Turley's testimony about barriers to entry in a way that post-release documents would not." But OpenAI said the older documents "cannot undermine Meaningfully represent” the current AI landscape.
The two sides reached an impasse, with OpenAI asking the court to throw out all the evidence requested by Google.
OpenAI and Google did not respond to requests for comment. The U.S. Justice Department declined to comment.