Leading US media outlets have made a new move in their copyright lawsuit against artificial intelligence company OpenAI. Outlets including The New York Times (NYT) and Daily News asked a federal court to impose sanctions, arguing that the company hid evidence and made misleading statements.
According to the petition filed in Manhattan federal court, OpenAI is accused of failing to share data sets and chat logs that could reveal how ChatGPT uses copyrighted news content. The plaintiffs argue that the company abused the evidence collection process, which could distort the evidence, and they are requesting sanctions.
New York Daily News attorney Steven Lieberman said that OpenAI has been making misleading statements for two years about its ability to search for copyrighted content in AI training data sets. Lieberman stated, "This motion asks the court to sanction OpenAI for hiding and destroying the evidence showing how ChatGPT was trained on stolen journalism."
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri denied the allegations in a statement to Reuters. Pusateri said, "As the Times' case has weakened and they have been forced to drop some of their claims against us, they continue to attempt to violate the privacy of people who have nothing to do with this case."
The NYT filed the copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023. The suit came after ChatGPT sparked a commercial AI boom. When Google began presenting AI-generated summaries in search results in 2024, it further reduced click-through revenue for news sites. Other news organizations later joined the NYT's lawsuit.
The Times has already spent more than $28 million on legal battles against AI companies. Those costs include another lawsuit the newspaper filed last year against AI company Perplexity. After the Associated Press signed a licensing deal with OpenAI in 2023, many media outlets began striking similar agreements, receiving payment for allowing AI companies to use their news archives for training.
