The New York Times, the Daily News, and more than a dozen other media organisations have filed a motion in a Manhattan federal court asking a judge to impose sanctions on OpenAI, escalating a legal fight over artificial intelligence and copyright that could shape the future of a struggling news industry. The publishers allege the ChatGPT maker withheld and destroyed evidence central to what could become a landmark copyright infringement trial over how OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft built their AI systems using millions of news articles.
At the heart of the complaint is an allegation that OpenAI misled the court for roughly two years by claiming it lacked the ability to search its training datasets and ChatGPT output logs for copyrighted material, a claim the publishers say was false. The allegation surfaced after a court ordered deposition of OpenAI data privacy engineer Vinnie Monaco, who reportedly revealed that OpenAI had already conducted internal searches of its training corpus for copyrighted journalism and had amassed a database of around 78 million de-identified ChatGPT conversations well before the news organisations filed suit. The publishers also allege OpenAI implemented an internal tool called Project Giraffe, using a filtering system to detect and record when its outputs reproduced original content, shortly after the lawsuit began, without disclosing this to the court.
Ian Crosby, lead attorney for the Times, said in a statement that OpenAI lied to the Times, the Daily News plaintiffs, the public, and the court, arguing that if the company genuinely believed its use of the publishers’ journalism was fair and legal, it would not have concealed the truth about the searches it had already conducted. Steven Lieberman, an attorney representing the Daily News and several sister publications, said OpenAI had been making misrepresentations for two years about its ability to search for copyrighted content within its systems. The publishers are asking the court to bar OpenAI from relying on a limited sample of chat logs it had negotiated down from an original request of 120 million logs to 20 million, to treat as established fact that fuller logs would have shown substantial reproduction of their content, and to award attorney fees covering their efforts to obtain the withheld evidence.
OpenAI has denied the allegations. Company spokesperson Drew Pusateri said in a statement that as the Times’ case weakens and the publisher has been forced to drop certain claims, it is persisting with efforts to invade the privacy of users unconnected to the case through what he described as blatantly false allegations, adding that the company will continue defending user privacy and long established fair use principles.
The Times originally sued OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, becoming the first major news organisation to bring legal action against a generative AI company over alleged copyright violations, and has since been joined by other publishers including MediaNews Group titles, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Ziff Davis. The Times has spent more than 28 million dollars fighting AI companies in court to date, according to regulatory filings, a figure that includes a separate lawsuit against AI search company Perplexity. The case forms part of a broader wave of AI copyright litigation working through US courts, with OpenAI rival Anthropic having already agreed to pay 1.5 billion dollars to settle a similar case brought by book authors, while a growing number of publishers have instead opted to sign licensing deals with OpenAI, Google, and Meta rather than pursue litigation.
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