The New York Times and over a dozen other media organizations alleged in a Thursday federal court filing that OpenAI withheld evidence central to copyright lawsuits against the tech company.
In the filing, which was obtained and viewed by TheWrap, the Times and other publishers asked for legal sanctions against Sam Altman’s company, alleging that OpenAI violated rules set down by the court and acted in “bad faith” during the discovery phase of litigation.
“This is a case about copying. There is no question that it happened,” the filing stated. “Nor should there be one about what was copied, how often, or to what end. The evidence is in OpenAI’s training datasets and ChatGPT output logs. But instead of just producing that evidence at the start of the case and focusing on the merits of its fair use defense, OpenAI chose obstruction.”
The filing continued: “It told News Plaintiffs and the Court, that it could not search for evidence that it copied their works to train its models, or again to ground their outputs, or yet again in the outputs themselves. None of this was true. OpenAI had done all these things — starting even before the first News Plaintiff filed suit.”
In response to the filing, an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement to media: “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.”
The sanctions filing comes nearly three years after the Times first sued OpenAI and Microsoft, in which they alleged copyright infringement over materials used to train OpenAI’s artificial intelligence models, which includes ChatGPT.
While OpenAI has repeatedly denied wrongdoing, the Times’ suit sparked additional legal action from reporters, with New York Times reporter John Carreyrou, former Wall Street Journal reporter Philip Shishkin and three others suing last year several tech giants, including OpenAI and Meta, for copyright infringement.
In their December suit, the journalists made similar claims, alleging “Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI and Perplexity, illegally copied vast quantities of copyrighted books without permission and then used those stolen copies to build and train their commercial large language models and/or optimize their product.”
