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Comment by fooey | Hacker News Reader

> Update, 5:35PM PT: A source close to Altman says the board had agreed in principle to resign and to allow Altman and Brockman to return, but has since waffled — missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign. If Altman decides to leave and start a new company, those staffers would assuredly go with him.

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There is no no compete agreement with Altman? How is that possible?

Non-competes (with three narrow exceptions, none of which apply here), are void in California (and the practice of making employees sign them even though they are unenforceable, a historically common way of making workers think they have less rights than they do, will become an actionable tort itself, on top of the agreements not being enforceable, due to a law going into effect January 1.)

Obviously, anything that Altman does that would compete with OpenAI will have OpenAI lawyers circling around looking for indicia of use of trade secrets or other IP, but non-competes aren't an issue.

Virtually all non-compete agreements are illegal and void in California. Limited exceptions exist for LPs, etc, but they do not apply here.

Non competes are not enforceable in California

They are based in California, where non-compete agreements are not allowed.

As everyone else has mentioned, there is no such thing in CA, but you can sue if employees reveal company secrets to their new employer. OpenAI would probably have a strong case if they suddenly released a copycat product soon after leaving.

These type of lawsuits are pretty rare though. for example, openai hasn’t sued anthropic founders. Google didn’t sue ilya or anyone else who left google brain to launch ai companies. The only one I have heard of is the self driving guy who went to Uber from gooogle ?

> . Google didn’t sue ilya or anyone else who left google brain to launch ai companies.

Is there any reason to think Ilya used Google technologies (other than what was publicly published without any legal protection against use that Google just did a poor job productizing) after leaving?

I am not saying they should have, just noting that it’s not common.

They had proof the Uber guy took hw designs and source code

Those are basically unenforceable in California.

People are speculating without knowing the details.

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