Acting at the direction of an entity requires that the entity actually instructed him to spy. If he was later planning to sell secrets to a foreign country or another corporation, but had not received their blessing ahead of time, that falls under acting on his own initiative. A foreign country is any country other than the US. Only government-backed efforts count. Another corporation is any corporation other than OpenAI, whether US-based or not. Spying at the direction of a foreign AI lab counts as a corporation, not a foreign country, even if the lab has some amount of state backing.
Whistleblowing means trying to record conversations about wrongdoing or unethical behavior at OpenAI to either turn over to US authorities or make public. Similarly, leaking means trying to record conversations to make public, but does not require a desire to expose wrongdoing.
Recording for other reasons covers things like workplace drama, stalking, etc. This is a catch-all for motives that don't involve trying to acquire secret or sensitive information.
Ideally, a court ruling will be used to resolve, but if one does not become available and court proceedings are no longer ongoing, I'll use my best judgment based on reporting.
Update 2026-10-13 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): - State-backed corporations count as another corporation if direction or coordination comes from the company.
Direction coming from a national intelligence service (or similar) counts as a foreign country.
Update 2026-10-14 (PST) (AI summary of creator comment): - Recording internal corporate information for personal interest (e.g., promotion criteria) resolves as recording for other reasons.
To qualify as secrets/IP, the information must be actual sensitive information that a competitor or adversary would be interested in.
1,000People are also trading
Some more information from today's court filing: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.480828/gov.uscourts.cand.480828.12.0.pdf
@nsokolsky If it's boring corporate stuff for his own benefit/interest, that's "recording for other reasons". To qualify as "secrets/IP" it has to be actual sensitive information that a competitor/adversary would be interested in.
@ChurlishGambit If the direction/coordination comes from the company, that's at the direction of another corporation. If it comes from a national intelligence service or similar, that's at the direction of a foreign country. Basically, a state-backed corporation counts as a corporation, not as a foreign country.
@Nick6d8e Interesting. So if MBS told a CEO to tell this guy to do it, you count it as a corporation, not the government? Very odd way to define it, but thank you for clarifying.
@ChurlishGambit Yeah, I agree it's a bit awkward, because clearly there is a significant government element there. But I imagine that with state-backed companies, that will always be a point of ambiguity (we may never learn exactly how involved the state-backing was, even). So gating it at which party was giving the immediate direction seemed like a way to avoid that ambiguity.