Publishers seek sanctions against OpenAI in copyright lawsuit fight
Publishers asked a Manhattan judge to punish OpenAI for allegedly hiding evidence, escalating a fight that could define AI training rules for journalism.
The New York Times, The New York Daily News and 15 other media organizations asked a federal court in Manhattan on Thursday to sanction OpenAI, saying the company lied about whether it could search its systems for evidence and then failed to turn over relevant material.
The publishers want monetary sanctions, special jury instructions and a formal finding of discovery misconduct. They say a heavily redacted April deposition from an OpenAI engineer undercuts the company’s claim that it could not search training datasets and output logs for proof that it misused millions of their articles in AI training.
The motion landed in the Southern District of New York, where the underlying copyright lawsuit was filed in December 2023. That case has become one of the most closely watched tests of whether AI companies can train models on copyrighted journalism without permission, a question with direct implications for news-industry revenue, licensing deals and the legal boundaries of generative AI.
OpenAI has pushed back by framing the discovery fight as a privacy battle. The company has said the Times is demanding 20 million private ChatGPT conversations and has called that request an invasion of user privacy. In earlier skirmishes, a federal judge in Manhattan ordered OpenAI to produce a sample of 20 million anonymized ChatGPT logs, a demand the company opposed on privacy grounds.
The sanctions request sharpens the stakes around more than one lawsuit. If the court agrees that OpenAI withheld evidence or misled the judge about what it could search, publishers would gain leverage in a fight that has already forced AI companies to defend the mechanics of their training pipelines, their logging systems and the limits of discovery when user data is involved. If the court rejects the request, OpenAI would strengthen its argument that publishers are using discovery to pry into private ChatGPT data while pressing a broader copyright challenge.
OpenAI has said, “We’ve been consistent in our support for journalism, the long-established principles of fair use, and the Constitution's promise of a more open, competitive future for sharing knowledge.” It has also said it is fighting the Times’ demand for 20 million private ChatGPT conversations while adding new security and privacy protections for user data.
The dispute now sits at the intersection of copyright law, data privacy and the economics of digital publishing, with a Manhattan judge set to decide whether this discovery fight becomes a procedural setback for OpenAI or a warning shot for the rest of the AI industry.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
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