A group of news publishers led by The New York Times asked a federal court in Manhattan on July 9 to sanction OpenAI, accusing the company of a “deliberate and systemic effort to obstruct discovery” in their long-running copyright case over the training of ChatGPT.
What the publishers allege
In a filing in the consolidated case In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation before the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, the publishers say OpenAI spent two years telling the court it could not search its models and internal logs for their copyrighted articles, while an OpenAI employee later testified the company had in fact run such searches — even before the first news plaintiff sued. The publishers also say OpenAI turned over 20 million de-identified ChatGPT output logs so heavily redacted that the court deemed them unusable.
What they’re asking for
The motion asks the judge to bar OpenAI from using the disputed output logs for any purpose, to instruct the jury that the logs show “substantial and systematic” copying of the publishers’ work, to stop OpenAI from arguing otherwise, and to award attorneys’ and experts’ fees tied to the discovery dispute.
OpenAI’s response
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri rejected the accusations, saying that “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.”
The original suit, filed by the Times and the New York Daily News against OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, has since been joined by other publishers and authors and consolidated into a multidistrict case. A ruling on the sanctions request has not yet been issued.