A group of major news outlets has taken a dramatic step in its ongoing fight with artificial‑intelligence companies. In a filing submitted Thursday to the Southern District of New York, The New York Times, Daily News and several other publishers asked a federal judge to impose sanctions on OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. The motion alleges the AI firm deliberately concealed and destroyed evidence that could show how its language model was trained on copyrighted news articles.
The court document describes OpenAI’s conduct as "choosing obstruction" rather than complying with discovery requests for datasets and ChatGPT logs. Those records, the plaintiffs argue, would illuminate whether the company scraped protected content without permission. Daily News attorney Steven Lieberman said OpenAI spent two years "making misrepresentations" about its ability to search its training data, a claim he says is contradicted by a recent deposition from an OpenAI employee.
In the motion, the publishers seek punitive measures for what they label "discovery misconduct" and request that OpenAI cover the legal fees they have incurred chasing the allegedly hidden evidence. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The request for sanctions arrives amid a widening lawsuit that began when The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023. Since then, dozens of newspapers, technology sites such as Ziff Davis, and the Center for Investigative Reporting have joined the case, arguing that AI firms profit from their journalism without compensating the sources.
At the heart of the dispute is the question of whether training AI on publicly available writing falls under copyright’s "fair use" doctrine. OpenAI maintains that its use of news articles is protected by fair use, a defense currently being tested in lawsuits across the creative industries. The Times frames the issue as unfair competition, contending that AI tools create "substitutive" products that answer readers’ queries without directing traffic or advertising revenue back to the original publishers.
The stakes are high for both sides. The Times reports it has spent more than $28 million on litigation against AI companies and wants OpenAI to reimburse those costs. A recent settlement by Anthropic, another AI firm, required it to pay $1.5 billion to book authors—a figure that, while massive, represents only a fraction of the company’s valuation.
Not all media organizations are pursuing lawsuits. Several outlets have entered licensing agreements with AI developers, and Getty Images recently reached a deal with a company it had sued. Regulators are also weighing in; for example, French authorities levied a €250 million fine against Google for related practices.
Legal experts say that a sanctions ruling against OpenAI would not resolve the underlying copyright question, but it could give publishers a new lever in negotiations with AI firms. The outcome may shape how the industry balances open‑source data use with the need to protect the economic value of journalism.
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