OpenAI has been "hiding and destroying evidence" of how it trained ChatGPT on copyrighted news content, US media organisations allege as legal costs in the landmark copyright battle top $28 million.
Media organisations including the New York Times and the Daily News are asking a federal judge to impose sanctions on OpenAI, escalating a legal fight over artificial intelligence and copyright that could reshape the future of a struggling news industry.
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The newspapers allege the ChatGPT maker is concealing evidence central to what could be a landmark copyright infringement trial over how OpenAI and its business partner, Microsoft, built their AI systems using millions of news articles.
At stake is whether AI chatbots are unfairly competing as an information source, draining web traffic without doing the journalistic work involved in gathering the news.
A filing on Thursday in a Manhattan federal court alleges OpenAI "chose obstruction" over releasing datasets 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 had 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.
The New York Times 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 more acute in 2024, when Google introduced AI-generated summaries at the top of search results, cutting off the advertising revenue generated when readers click through to an original source.
The Times has since been joined by other news organisations, including Daily News and Chicago Tribune parent MediaNews Group, digital media publisher Ziff Davis and the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting.
OpenAI and other tech companies have argued that training their AI systems on digitised books, online articles and other web content is protected by the "fair use" doctrine of US copyright law — a theory being tested in dozens of lawsuits as visual artists, novelists, music labels and other creative industries take AI companies to court, with mixed results.
In the largest copyright settlement so far, OpenAI rival Anthropic agreed to pay book authors $1.5 billion (€1.35bn) for training its Claude chatbot on their works without authorisation.
The Times's arguments differ from those brought by book authors.
In its original lawsuit and an amended complaint filed last month, it focused on the unfair competition of companies that seek to profit from its journalism without permission or payment to build rival products.
The Times has already spent more than $28 million (€25m) fighting AI companies in court, according to regulatory filings disclosing its litigation costs — including a separate lawsuit filed last year against AI company Perplexity.
Among the sanctions sought on Thursday are attorney fees to cover the cost of securing what the newspapers call "improperly withheld" evidence.
The escalating legal costs come as a growing number of media organisations have signed licensing deals with OpenAI and other AI companies, including Google and Meta, that pay outlets a fee to train AI systems on their news feeds or archives.
