Thomas C. Rubin

Thomas C. Rubin of Seattle, Wash., is Chief of Intellectual Property and Content at Open AI, where he is responsible for products, policy and partnerships, and regularly teaches seminars focused on technology law and policy as a Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School. Previously, he served for many years as Chief Intellectual Property Strategy Counsel at Microsoft.

Tom is an expert on legal, policy, and business issues related to content, innovation, and the internet. He has led several collaborative efforts with leaders in the technology and content industries, including product partnerships, policy initiatives, and amicus briefs. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and addressed the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia, International Copyright Forum in China, World Artificial Intelligence Conference in China, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., World Association of Newspapers, Association of American Publishers, and Magazine Publishers of America, among many others. In addition to teaching at Stanford, Tom has taught seminars at Harvard Law School and Yale College.

Tom started his career as a journalist and has remained deeply involved in the field as a lawyer. While in college at Yale, he was the editor of the Yale Daily News Magazine and worked for the Associated Press, CBS News in London, and WNET in New York. Between college and law school, he worked at The New York Times as a copyboy and then news clerk and supervisor. After graduating from Stanford Law School, he practiced media law at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York, and represented Slate, MSNBC, and MSN while at Microsoft. More recently, he was Special Counsel at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.

Before joining Microsoft, Tom served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, where he was one of the country’s first prosecutors of computer, electronic, and intellectual property crimes and was awarded the U.S. Department of Justice’s Director’s Award for Superior Performance.