Jeremy O. Harris reportedly likened OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to a Nazi at an Oscars party this weekend.
According to a report from Page Six, citing “sputtering spies,” the moment went down at the star-stacked Vanity Fair party on Sunday (March 15). It wasn’t immediately clear why someone as incongruous with the very idea of art as Altman would even be in attendance at such an event, but I digress.
At one point, according to the report, Harris—whose work as a writer includes Slave Play and Zola—“confronted” Altman over OpenAI’s recently announced Department of War contract. Harris is claimed to have slammed Altman as the “Goebbels of the Trump administration,” marking a reference to Adolf Hitler’s close associate Joseph Goebbels, a prominent Nazi Party propagandist who killed himself in 1945 shortly after Hitler’s own suicide.
Tuesday’s report notes that stars including Timothée Chalamet and Michael B. Jordan were also in the crowd at the time of Harris’s alleged confronting of Altman, who was last year accused of sexual abuse in a lawsuit from his younger sister.
Page Six claimed that Harris was intoxicated at the time, also citing an email they say they received from the Tony nominee in which he offered a correction to his originally reported comment. The alleged email, cited here, is said to have seen Harris saying “a few too many martinis” led him to misspeak at the party.
“I should’ve said Friedrich Flick,” he reportedly added.
Flick, of course, was a convicted war criminal whose financial contributions to the Nazi Party were substantial.
Complex has reached out to reps for Harris and OpenAI for comment. This story may be updated.
For those who may be wondering “Wait, OpenAI actually has a deal with the Department of War?” while reading this article, the answer is yes. Earlier this month, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, asserted that “additional language” added to the agreement “makes explicit that our tools will not be used to conduct domestic surveillance of U.S. persons.”
More recently, OpenAI was accused of “massive copyright infringement” by Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster. In court documents viewed by Complex on Tuesday, OpenAI is accused of using tens of thousands of copyrighted materials to train its ChatGPT large language model (LLM).
