New York Times accuses Microsoft of pushing OpenAI to use copyrighted articles

The New York Times has amended its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing Microsoft of encouraging OpenAI to train its A.I. systems on copyrighted articles. The case was filed on December 27, 2023, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and it remains active in discovery with no trial date set.

The filing keeps the central dispute intact: the Times says OpenAI and Microsoft used millions of its articles to train large language models, and that those models can reproduce or closely paraphrase Times reporting in response to prompts. By putting Microsoft more squarely in the frame, the amended complaint turns the lawsuit into a direct test of whether a major platform partner can be treated as an active participant in the training practices that fuel generative A.I., not just as a financier sitting at one remove.

The litigation has already become a contest over evidence, not just theory. Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang ordered OpenAI in May 2025 to preserve and segregate output log data that otherwise would have been deleted, and later granted in part the News Plaintiffs’ motion to compel preservation of those logs. Those disputes matter because the Times is trying to show both what data went into the models and how the models responded when prompted with requests that could surface copyrighted material.

The case now sits inside a broader wave of copyright litigation against A.I. companies. On June 24, 2026, a coalition of nearly 400 newspapers sued OpenAI and Microsoft over scraped content used to build products such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, arguing that the work of publishers helped create the value of the A.I. boom without compensation. For newsrooms, the outcome could help define whether licensing becomes a standard cost of A.I. development or whether publishers must keep fighting case by case for payment and control.