Does a judge’s now-sold stake in a defendant company require her to step aside from one of the most consequential AI copyright dockets in the country? Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang says no. In a filing disclosed last week, Wang acknowledged she owned Microsoft stock while presiding over the consolidated copyright lawsuits that newspapers and authors have brought against Microsoft and OpenAI over training-data use, but she told the court she has since divested and that the holding “has not affected or impacted any decision in this case.”
That answer holds up only as far as the timing of the disclosure allows scrutiny. Federal recusal law under 28 U.S.C. § 455 generally treats a judge’s financial interest in a party as disqualifying regardless of intent, which is why Wang conceded the stock would ordinarily have forced her off the case. Her remedy — sell the shares, then stay — sidesteps recusal rather than confronting whether her prior rulings, made while she still held the stock, need to be revisited by the plaintiffs or Microsoft itself. For a docket this closely watched, that gap between disclosure and consequence is likely to draw motions testing whether divestiture after the fact is enough.
The episode also underscores how tightly Microsoft is woven into nearly every major AI legal fight, not just as OpenAI’s largest backer but as a named defendant in its own right.
A judge selling Microsoft stock to stay on an OpenAI copyright case is a small disclosure with an outsized signal: Microsoft’s fingerprints are now a recusal risk across the AI docket, not just a financing footnote.
Separately, in California’s Musk v. OpenAI antitrust suit, the Justice Department and FTC have already sided with Elon Musk’s argument that Microsoft executive Reid Hoffman’s simultaneous board seats violated the Clayton Act’s ban on interlocking directorates — the same company, a different courtroom, the same underlying conflict-of-interest theme. For data licensors and AI defendants watching these cases shape fair-use and antitrust precedent, the Wang disclosure is a reminder that Microsoft’s sprawl into OpenAI’s ownership structure is generating friction well beyond the merits, and litigants should expect conflict-of-interest challenges to become a recurring subplot as these cases head toward trial.
"My ownership of this stock has not affected or impacted any decision in this case," Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang said in a Friday filing.
— Reuters
