A man who works at an AI watchdog group was alarmed when OpenAI suddenly showed up at his doorstep last fall, demanding he turn over documents. To his utter disbelief, he was being subpoenaed.

“It’s a bit scary to know that the most valuable private company in the world has your address and has shown up and has questions for you,” the man, Tyler Johnston, who founded the nonprofit advocacy group The Midas Project, said in a new interview with A More Perfect Union.

“They were asking for every former employee we had spoken to and what we said to them,” he added. “Every congressional office that we spoke to, every potential investor that we spoke to.”

Johnston wasn’t alone. In all, NBC News reported last October that at least seven nonprofits that had been critical of OpenAI were served with subpoenas around the time of reporting, as part of a lawsuit between OpenAI and Elon Musk.

Later the same October that Johnston was subpoenaed, OpenAI completed its restructuring into a for-profit public benefit corporation, a move that was over a year and a half in the making. It had been challenged at every turn by Microsoft, which had invested billions of dollars into the startup, and Musk, who cofounded OpenAI but left the company in 2018 reportedly over disagreements with Altman, and who was now suing it for abandoning its original altruist mission of building open source models.

As the suit dragged out, a paranoid-sounding OpenAI began accusing its critics of being funded by Musk. And that’s how representatives from the company ended up at Johnston’s house.

“They wanted every single text message and document that we had that in any way related to OpenAI’s restructuring,” he told Perfect Union.