Introduction
Jeff Bezos sought in November 2025 to make a remarkable entry into the world of AI. He launched “Project Prometheus”, an AI venture which had behind it around $6.2 billion in initial funding. Initially without a website, the venture poached researchers from the likes of Meta, DeepMind and OpenAI.
But how does this newcomer line up with the likes of the established AI powerhouse OpenAI? What are the legal implications behind their establishment and growth? We will break down the key themes of this new chapter in the rise of AI.
Comparison: OpenAI and Project Prometheus
In 2015, OpenAI was founded as a non-profit to ensure that AI benefits all of humanity. Over the last 10 years it has grown into a giant generative AI. It developed a series of market-leading models, including GPT-4.1 and GPT-5.1. ChatGPT now manages over 2.5 billion prompts daily. The organisation has since transitioned to a for-profit structure. Recently, OpenAI said it will spend $250 billion on Microsoft’s platforms following the significant investments the tech giant has made in OpenAI.
By contrast, Project Prometheus is not another chatbot developer but a pioneer of “physical AI”. This refers to systems that interact with and learn from the real world, especially in engineering and aerospace applications. Although details about concrete physical products remain scarce, its focus on training machines to learn from the physical world distinguishes it from OpenAI’s focus on digital infrastructure.
How Legal Teams Get Involved
The rapid growth in AI across multiple industries inevitably demands legal work from numerous departments across law firms, including:
Intellectual Property: Startups such as Project Prometheus, which are recruiting researchers from labs, raise questions around patent ownership, trade secrets and non-compete clauses. IP teams in large firms will review IP licences granted by the project developer and secure the registration of intellectual property rights at the relevant Registry.
Regulatory & Compliance: Since AI systems are expanding into the physical realm through industrial automation, EVs and robots, product liability and safety regulations must be strictly adhered to. R&C departments will deal with safety norms, consumer protection law and the question of who will be liable in case of defects.
Litigation: Legal action is inevitable in an industry which benefits from so much investment. Litigation teams will often deal with trademark infringement claims, defamation lawsuits and breach of data privacy actions. The lawyers will have to determine when to serve the claim forms, which alternative dispute resolution methods to consider in the pre-action phase and which witnesses to bring in court.
Commercial: Both OpenAI and Prometheus rely heavily on enterprise contracts, international licensing deals and data use agreements. Corporate legal teams which specialise in commercial contracts and data protection will play a key role in structuring commercial partnerships between OpenAI, for example, and its vendors.
Future Outlook: A Traffic Light Approach
This risk analysis uses Byte Sized Legal’s traffic light system to indicate legal risk levels: red (🔴) for high, yellow (🟡) for moderate, and green (🟢) for low.
🔴Ownership, Secrecy, and Physical Risk
Project Prometheus’s rapid recruitment of senior researchers from rival AI labs creates significant intellectual property risks. Courts often must determine where lawful expertise ends and misappropriated trade secrets begin. Prometheus’s focus on physical AI increases this risk, as proprietary methods and data are more difficult to distinguish. If innovation appears imported rather than independently developed, this could lead to injunctions, cross-border litigation, and lengthy disputes, all of which may delay deployment.
🟠Regulation vs Reality
As Prometheus expands from software to machines that interact with the physical world, regulatory uncertainty is inevitable. Current safety, consumer protection, and product liability laws do not address autonomous learning systems. Legal teams must interpret new AI regulations alongside established engineering standards, often with limited guidance. Compliance is achievable but requires ongoing adjustment as lawmakers balance innovation and public safety. In these sectors, failure has tangible consequences.
🟢Commercial Structure and Control
Prometheus operates on firmer ground in its commercial and corporate arrangements. Licensing, procurement, and partnerships can be structured with familiar contracts. This enables transparent risk allocation. While disputes may arise, the law is settled enough to offer predictability. For a venture backed by billions, this stability counterbalances the more experimental and legally fragile sides of its ambition.