By Blake Brittain
July 9 (Reuters) – A group of newspapers including the New York Times and New York Daily News asked a federal court in Manhattan on Thursday to sanction OpenAI in their high-stakes copyright dispute for allegedly lying to the court about its ability to search its systems for proof that it misused millions of their articles in AI training.
The newspapers told the court in a filing that OpenAI falsely told the court it could not search its large language models for their copyrighted material while hiding that it had done so “even before the first News Plaintiff filed suit.”
The newspapers said that OpenAI had also deleted billions of relevant ChatGPT conversations or made them unsearchable. They asked the court for sanctions, including attorneys’ fees, and a court finding that OpenAI’s chat logs showed that the company misused their copyrighted works.
OpenAI has previously argued that turning over ChatGPT conversation logs would risk violating users’ privacy.
“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,” OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said in response to the newspapers’ filing.
The Times dropped a secondary copyright infringement claim it had previously brought against OpenAI in an amended complaint filed last month.
The lawsuit, first filed by the Times in 2023, accuses OpenAI and its largest financial backer Microsoft of using millions of its articles without permission to train the large language model behind OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT.
The case is one of many brought by copyright owners including authors, visual artists and music labels against tech companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms for allegedly misusing their material to train AI systems.
“For over two years, OpenAI lied to The Times, The Daily News Plaintiffs, the public, and the court,” the New York Times’ lead attorney Ian Crosby said in a statement. “It claimed searching ChatGPT outputs for copies of The Times’ and the Daily News Plaintiffs’ content was infeasible, burdensome, and invasive of users’ privacy — while at the same time concealing that it had already done such searches.”
New York Daily News attorney Steven Lieberman said the motion “asks the court to punish OpenAI for hiding and destroying evidence showing how ChatGPT was trained on stolen journalism.”
OpenAI previously told the court that it did not have tools to search its datasets and output logs for copyrighted material, but later, an OpenAI employee testified that the company had “performed multiple searches for News Plaintiffs’ content,” according to the newspapers’ Thursday filing.
(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; edited by David Gaffen and David Gregorio)
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