New York Times-Led Publishers Escalate Copyright Fight, Seek Court Sanctions Against OpenAI
The New York Times and several other news organizations have intensified their copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, asking a federal judge in Manhattan to sanction the company over allegations that it misled the court about its ability to identify copyrighted material within its AI systems.
According to court filings cited by AP News, the publishers argue OpenAI withheld datasets and ChatGPT usage records that are critical to determining whether their copyrighted articles were used in ways that violate copyright law.
“OpenAI misled the Court and News Plaintiffs regarding its existing technical capacity all while continuing to compress and delete billions of conversation logs,” the plaintiffs said in the filing.
“As the Times’ case weakens and they’ve been forced to drop claims against us, they’re persisting with their efforts to invade the privacy of people who have nothing to do with this case, including by making these blatantly false allegations. We’ll continue defending our users’ privacy and the long-established principles of fair use,” a spokesperson for OpenAI told Benzinga.
The publishers also contend that testimony from an OpenAI employee contradicts the company’s earlier representations during the discovery process. Specifically, they point to testimony indicating OpenAI had searched its systems for the publishers’ content after previously telling the court it lacked the technical capability to conduct such searches.
OpenAI has previously argued that producing ChatGPT conversation records could compromise user privacy. The publishers, however, characterize their sanctions request as a response to what they describe as missing or concealed evidence that is central to the case.
The lawsuit stems from a complaint filed by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, alleging the companies used its journalism without permission to train AI models. Since then, additional publishers have joined the litigation, including MediaNews Group newspapers such as the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, as well as Ziff Davis and the Center for Investigative Reporting.
As part of the sanctions motion, the publishers are also seeking attorney fees tied to what they say were unnecessary efforts to obtain evidence that should have been produced during discovery.
The lawsuit adds to a growing wave of legal challenges from publishers, authors and other content creators, as courts weigh how copyright law applies to AI models trained on publicly available and copyrighted material.
In March, Grammarly faced a lawsuit over the alleged use of its Expert Review AI tool. Julia Angwin, a contributing opinion editor at The New York Times, alleges that the tool used her name and others’ without prior consent.
Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, is also facing a lawsuit from music rights management company BMG. According to a Rolling Stone report, BMG alleges that Anthropic used lyrics from major artists to train its chatbot without obtaining proper authorization.
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