The New York Times, the Daily News and other US media outlets are asking a United States federal judge to impose sanctions on OpenAI, escalating a fight over artificial intelligence (AI) and copyright that could shape the future of a struggling news industry.

The newspapers allege the ChatGPT maker is hiding evidence important to what could be a landmark copyright infringement trial over how OpenAI and its business partner, Microsoft, built their AI technologies using millions of news articles. At issue is whether AI chatbots are unfairly competing as an information source, siphoning off web traffic without doing the journalistic work involved in gathering the news.

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A filing on Thursday in a Manhattan federal courthouse alleges OpenAI “chose obstruction” over releasing data sets and ChatGPT logs that could show how the AI system used copyrighted news content. The plaintiffs are asking the judge to penalise the company for “discovery misconduct” that could distort evidence, saying a recent deposition of an OpenAI employee contradicts the company’s earlier claims.

New York Daily News attorney Steven Lieberman said OpenAI has been “making misrepresentations” for two years about its ability to search for copyrighted content in its AI training datasets and logs.

“This motion asks the court to punish OpenAI for hiding and destroying evidence showing how ChatGPT was trained on stolen journalism,” said Lieberman, who represents the Daily News and seven of its sister papers.

OpenAI has previously argued that turning over ChatGPT conversation logs would risk violating users’ privacy.

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“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 Reuters news agency reported.

Misuse material

The New York Times (NYT) sued OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, about a year after ChatGPT’s debut sparked a commercial AI boom and began changing the way people search for information online. The threat to news publications became even more apparent when Google in 2024 introduced AI-generated summaries at the top of online search results, cutting off the advertising dollars that come when people click a link to the information’s original source. The NYT was then joined by other news companies.

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.

The Times has already spent more than $28m on fighting AI companies in court, according to filings with financial regulators that disclose its litigation costs. The costs include another lawsuit the newspaper filed last year against AI company Perplexity.

The mounting costs come as a growing number of media organisations have signed licensing deals with OpenAI and other AI companies such as Google and Facebook parent Meta that typically pay the outlet a fee to be able to train AI systems on their news feeds or archives. The Associated Press was the first to announce such a deal with OpenAI in 2023.