OpenAI has hired a onetime Microsoft intellectual property lawyer, Tom Rubin, to oversee products, policy and partnerships, the company confirmed. His hiring means OpenAI has an intellectual property specialist in charge of negotiating deals with news publishers to license use of their material in training large-language models that run ChatGPT.

Rubin, who most recently has been a law lecturer at Stanford University, had been an adviser to OpenAI since 2020, according to his LinkedIn page. His hiring comes as OpenAI has approached a variety of publishers to negotiate agreements for use of their archives, according to one major publisher.