New York Times v. OpenAI
In plain wordsA major lawsuit, filed in 2023, in which The New York Times accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of copying millions of its articles to train ChatGPT and of letting the chatbot reproduce its journalism.
A copyright suit filed on December 27, 2023 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York by The New York Times Company against OpenAI and Microsoft, the most prominent of the news publishers' cases against AI developers. The Times alleges that millions of its articles were copied to train GPT models; that ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot can output near-verbatim passages, which its complaint illustrated with regurgitated articles; that the products summarize and substitute for paywalled reporting; and that models attribute fabricated content to the paper, harming its trademarks. OpenAI responds that training is fair usefair use and AI training, phr.: The unsettled US legal question of whether AI companies may copy books, articles, pictures and music to train their models without permission, under the rule that allows some unlicensed uses of copyrighted work., that regurgitation is a rare bug elicited by manipulative prompting, and that its products do not substitute for journalism. In 2025 the case was consolidated with authors' and other publishers' suits before Judge Sidney Stein, and orders requiring OpenAI to preserve and produce samples of ChatGPT user logs drew privacy objections. As of October 2026 the parties in the consolidated cases were briefing summary judgment.
Discovery in New York Times v. OpenAI turned partly on a sample of twenty million ChatGPT logs.
Origin
Filed after licensing talks between the Times and OpenAI broke down in 2023; in April 2025 the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation centralized the US copyright cases against OpenAI in New York as In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation.
Usage note
Other publishers chose licensing deals with OpenAI instead, and the Times itself licensed content for AI use to Amazon in 2025, illustrating the two paths, litigation and licensing, that the news industry has taken.
Related
- AI copyright litigationAI copyright litigation, n.: The many lawsuits in which authors, artists, news organizations, record labels and others accuse AI companies of copying their work without permission to build or run AI models.
- fair use and AI trainingfair use and AI training, phr.: The unsettled US legal question of whether AI companies may copy books, articles, pictures and music to train their models without permission, under the rule that allows some unlicensed uses of copyrighted work.
- memorizationmemorization, n.: When an AI model stores specific pieces of its training data — a paragraph, a phone number, an image — closely enough to reproduce them, instead of only learning general patterns.
- Bartz v. AnthropicBartz v. Anthropic, prop. n.: A US lawsuit by book authors against the AI company Anthropic that ended in a record $1.5 billion settlement, after a judge ruled that training on purchased books was legal but keeping pirated copies was not.
- OpenAIOpenAI, prop. n.: The American company that makes ChatGPT and the GPT models. It began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and is now a for-profit company overseen by a nonprofit foundation.
- ChatGPTChatGPT, prop. n.: OpenAI's AI chatbot, released free to the public in November 2022, which answers questions, writes and converses in everyday language. Its sudden popularity began the current AI boom.
Sources
- ChatGPT Is Eating the World (2026). Summary judgment briefing starts in OpenAI MDL litigation before Judge Stein. September 4, 2026.
Mentioned in
AI copyright litigationAI copyright litigation, n.: The many lawsuits in which authors, artists, news organizations, record labels and others accuse AI companies of copying their work without permission to build or run AI models., fair use and AI trainingfair use and AI training, phr.: The unsettled US legal question of whether AI companies may copy books, articles, pictures and music to train their models without permission, under the rule that allows some unlicensed uses of copyrighted work., Bartz v. AnthropicBartz v. Anthropic, prop. n.: A US lawsuit by book authors against the AI company Anthropic that ended in a record $1.5 billion settlement, after a judge ruled that training on purchased books was legal but keeping pirated copies was not.