OpenAI may have made a fatal misstep in copyright fight with news orgs
Ars Technica AI · Ashley Belanger · 2026-07-09
The New York Times and allied news publishers file a sanctions motion accusing OpenAI of hiding billions of user-query logs and faking an inability to search its training data to obstruct copyright infringement litigation.
Extraction
Topics: ai-copyrightopenai-litigationtraining-datafair-use
Claims
- News organizations led by The New York Times have filed a sanctions motion alleging OpenAI repeatedly lied over years to conceal evidence of copyright infringement.
- OpenAI allegedly hid billions of logs showing users prompting ChatGPT to reproduce copyrighted news content verbatim.
- OpenAI is accused of faking an inability to search its own training data to prevent plaintiffs from accessing this evidence.
- The concealed logs are considered pivotal evidence that could either establish infringement or support a fair-use defense.
- The litigation centers on whether ChatGPT's reproduction of news content constitutes transformative fair use or actionable copying.
Key quotes
news organizations suing OpenAI—led by The New York Times—accused the AI firm of repeatedly lying for years to conceal evidence of infringement that could hobble OpenAI's defense
This evidence is considered among the most important to both sides, potentially either dooming OpenAI as an infringer or exonerating its chatbot technology as a transformative fair use of news sites' content
OpenAI is facing calls for 'serious sanctions'