Newspapers Seek Sanctions Against OpenAI Over Alleged Evidence Concealment

A group of newspapers, including The New York Times and New York Daily News, has asked a US federal court in Manhattan to sanction OpenAI in a high-stakes copyright dispute, alleging that the AI company misled the court about its ability to search its systems for evidence that it had used millions of copyrighted articles to train its artificial intelligence models.

In a court filing on Thursday, the publishers claimed OpenAI falsely told the court that it could not search its large language models for their copyrighted material, while concealing that such searches had already been carried out “even before the first News Plaintiff filed suit”.

The newspapers also alleged that OpenAI had deleted billions of relevant ChatGPT conversations or made them inaccessible. They asked the court to impose sanctions, including legal fees, and to rule that ChatGPT logs demonstrated that the company had misused their copyrighted works.

OpenAI has previously argued that handing over ChatGPT conversation logs could compromise user privacy.

Responding to the filing, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the publishers were continuing efforts to access private conversations of people unrelated to the case, adding that the allegations were “blatantly false”.

The New York Times recently dropped a secondary copyright infringement claim against OpenAI in an amended complaint filed last month.

The lawsuit, originally filed by The New York Times in 2023, accuses OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train the large language model behind the company’s ChatGPT chatbot.

The case is among several copyright disputes brought by authors, artists, music companies and other rights holders against technology firms, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, over allegations that their creative works were used without authorisation to train AI systems.

“For over two years, OpenAI lied to The Times, The Daily News Plaintiffs, the public and the court,” Ian Crosby, lead counsel for The New York Times, said in a statement. He alleged that OpenAI claimed searching ChatGPT outputs for copies of copyrighted content was impractical and invasive of user privacy, while it had already conducted such searches.

New York Daily News attorney Steven Lieberman said the motion sought to hold OpenAI accountable for allegedly concealing and destroying evidence related to how ChatGPT was trained on journalism content.

According to the newspapers’ filing, OpenAI had previously told the court that it lacked tools to search its training datasets and output logs for copyrighted material. However, a company employee later testified that OpenAI had carried out “multiple searches” for the publishers’ content.

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