US media outlets, including The New York Times (NYT) and Daily News, have asked a federal judge to impose sanctions on artificial intelligence company OpenAI. The outlets allege that OpenAI concealed evidence and made misleading statements in a copyright infringement lawsuit.
In a petition filed Thursday in Manhattan federal court, the plaintiffs alleged that OpenAI 'chose to obstruct' and did not share datasets and chat logs that could reveal how ChatGPT uses copyrighted news content. The plaintiffs are seeking sanctions, arguing that the company 'abused the discovery process' and that this could taint the evidence.
New York Daily News attorney Steven Lieberman said OpenAI has made 'misleading statements' for two years about its ability to search for copyrighted content in its AI training datasets. 'This motion asks the court to punish OpenAI for hiding and destroying evidence of how ChatGPT was trained on stolen journalism,' Lieberman said.
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri rejected the allegations, telling Reuters: 'As the Times' case has weakened and they have been forced to drop some of their claims against us, they are continuing their efforts to violate the privacy of individuals who have nothing to do with this lawsuit.'
NYT filed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023. The lawsuit came after ChatGPT sparked a commercial AI boom. Google's introduction of AI-generated summaries in search results in 2024 further eroded news sites' click-through revenue. Other news organizations later joined NYT's lawsuit.
The Times has already spent more than $28 million on its legal battle against AI companies. These costs also include another lawsuit the newspaper filed last year against AI company Perplexity. Meanwhile, after the Associated Press signed a licensing agreement with OpenAI in 2023, many media outlets began making similar deals, charging AI companies for the use of their news archives in training.
