New York Times and Daily News Ask Judge to Sanction OpenAI Over Chat-Log Sample in Copyright Case

The New York Times and The Daily News filed a motion asking a federal judge to sanction OpenAI for allegedly withholding evidence and altering discovery materials in their copyright lawsuit against the company. The motion states that OpenAI conducted internal searches of its training corpus for copyrighted journalism, maintained a database of about 78 million de-identified ChatGPT conversations before the suit was filed, and deployed a Bloom filter under a project called Project Giraffe to track regurgitation of protected content.

The outlets further allege the company deleted billions of ChatGPT outputs after the lawsuit began, violating a preservation order.

Plaintiffs originally requested a sample of 120 million chat logs but agreed to a reduced sample of 20 million. A federal court later described the delivered sample as unusable due to extensive redactions. OpenAI data privacy engineer Vinnie Monaco stated during an April court-ordered deposition that the company had already performed internal evaluations of its training data for copyrighted works.

OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri denied the allegations and accused the Times of attempting to access private user conversations. "As the Times’ case weakens and they’ve been forced to drop claims against us, they’re persisting with their efforts to invade the privacy of people who have nothing to do with this case, including by making these blatantly false allegations," Pusateri said.

The outlets are seeking to bar OpenAI from using the 20 million log sample as evidence, to have certain facts about regurgitation treated as established, and to require the company to pay legal fees tied to the discovery disputes.

The two-year lawsuit centers on claims that OpenAI trained its models on the outlets’ journalism and reproduced that content in user outputs. Plaintiffs’ lead counsel Ian B. Crosby said the company would not have hidden its actions if it believed the copying was legal.

"If OpenAI genuinely believed that copying our clients’ journalism was fair and legal, it wouldn’t have hid the truth about having done it," Crosby said.