A group of newspapers, led by The New York Times and the New York Daily News, has asked a federal court in Manhattan to impose sanctions on OpenAI, alleging the company misled the court in an ongoing copyright dispute. In a court filing, the publishers claimed OpenAI falsely stated that it could not search its AI systems for copyrighted newspaper content while allegedly concealing that such searches had already been conducted before the lawsuits were filed. They also accused the company of deleting or making billions of ChatGPT conversation records unsearchable, and requested sanctions, including attorneys’ fees and a finding that the chat logs demonstrate misuse of their copyrighted works.
The lawsuit, originally filed by The New York Times in 2023, accuses OpenAI and its major financial backer, Microsoft, of using millions of newspaper articles without authorization to train the large language model behind ChatGPT. The publishers argue that OpenAI’s actions infringed on their copyrights and that the company failed to be transparent about its internal practices during the legal proceedings.
The case is one of several high-profile copyright lawsuits brought by authors, artists, music labels, and media organizations against AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta Platforms, over the use of copyrighted material for AI training. According to the latest filing, OpenAI had previously told the court it lacked the capability to search its datasets and output logs for copyrighted content, but later testimony from an OpenAI employee reportedly revealed that multiple searches for the newspapers’ content had in fact been carried out. OpenAI had not responded to the latest court filing at the time of reporting.
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