NEW YORK — A coalition of prominent news organizations, including The New York Times and the Daily News, is asking a federal judge in Manhattan to impose sanctions on OpenAI, intensifying a legal battle over artificial intelligence and copyright law that many say could determine the fate of the news industry.
The media companies allege that OpenAI — the company behind the popular ChatGPT chatbot — has been concealing evidence critical to what could become a landmark copyright infringement trial. At the heart of the case is how OpenAI and its business partner, Microsoft, used millions of news articles to develop their AI technologies. The broader question is whether AI chatbots are unfairly drawing users away from news websites, capturing web traffic without performing the reporting work that produced the content.
A court filing submitted Thursday in a Manhattan federal courthouse accuses OpenAI of choosing “obstruction” rather than turning over datasets and ChatGPT activity logs that could demonstrate how the AI system made use of copyrighted journalism. The news organizations are asking the judge to penalize OpenAI for what they describe as “discovery misconduct” that could distort the evidence in the case. They say a recent deposition of an OpenAI employee contradicts statements the company previously made.
Attorney Steven Lieberman, who represents the Daily News and seven of its affiliated newspapers, said OpenAI has spent two years making false claims about its capacity to search for copyrighted material in its AI training data and logs.
“This motion asks the court to punish OpenAI for hiding and destroying evidence showing how ChatGPT was trained on stolen journalism,” Lieberman said.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment by Thursday.
The New York Times originally filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, roughly a year after ChatGPT launched and set off a wave of commercial AI development that began transforming how people look up information online. The danger to news outlets became even clearer in 2024, when Google began displaying AI-generated answer summaries at the top of search results — cutting into the advertising revenue that news sites depend on when readers click through to their stories.
Since then, additional news organizations have joined the legal effort, including MediaNews Group-owned outlets such as the Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, digital publisher Ziff Davis, and the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting.
OpenAI and other technology companies have maintained that training AI systems on digitized books, web articles, and other online text is permitted under the “fair use” provision of U.S. copyright law. That argument is now being tested across dozens of lawsuits brought by visual artists, authors, music labels, and other creative industries — with varying outcomes so far.
In the largest AI copyright settlement to date, OpenAI competitor Anthropic agreed to pay book authors $1.5 billion after its Claude chatbot was trained on pirated works. That figure, while substantial, represents only a small portion of Anthropic’s $965 billion market valuation as the company prepares to go public.
The New York Times is making a somewhat different legal argument than the book authors. In its original lawsuit and an updated complaint filed last month, the newspaper focused on unfair competition, arguing that AI companies are trying to “free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment.”
The Times has already spent more than $28 million fighting AI companies in court, according to disclosures filed with financial regulators. That total includes a separate lawsuit the paper filed against AI company Perplexity. Among the penalties the newspapers are seeking Thursday are attorney fees to cover the costs of trying to obtain evidence they say was improperly withheld.
These escalating legal costs come as a growing number of news organizations have instead chosen to sign licensing agreements with OpenAI and other AI companies — including Google and Facebook parent Meta — that pay outlets a fee to train AI systems on their content. The Associated Press was the first news organization to announce such an agreement with OpenAI, doing so in 2023.
