A group of news publishers has asked a federal judge to impose sanctions on OpenAI. The New York Times, the Daily News, and others allege the ChatGPT maker is concealing evidence central to their copyright case, the Associated Press reports.
A filing on Thursday in Manhattan federal court claims OpenAI “chose obstruction” over handing over datasets and ChatGPT logs. Those records could show how the system used copyrighted news content to train.
The publishers accuse OpenAI of “discovery misconduct”, saying a recent deposition of an OpenAI employee contradicts the company’s earlier claims. Daily News lawyer Steven Lieberman said OpenAI had spent two years “making misrepresentations” about its ability to search its training data.
The motion asks the court to punish OpenAI for hiding and destroying evidence, in Lieberman’s words. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The stakes reach well beyond one filing. The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, and has since been joined by a wave of other newspapers, alongside Ziff Davis and the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Fair use, or free-riding
At the heart of the fight is a simple question with no settled answer. OpenAI argues that training AI on public writing is protected by copyright’s “fair use” doctrine, a defence being tested in dozens of suits from artists, novelists, and music labels.
The Times frames it differently, as unfair competition. It says AI firms free-ride on its costly journalism to build “substitutive” products that answer readers without sending them, or ad money, back to the source.
That threat sharpened when AI-generated search answers began cutting publisher traffic. Courts are only starting to weigh in, with a German court finding Google liable for its AI Overviews.
A costly, forking road
The litigation is expensive. The Times says it has spent more than $28m fighting AI companies, including a separate suit against Perplexity, and now wants OpenAI to cover fees for chasing withheld evidence.
There is a benchmark for what losing can cost. Anthropic agreed to pay book authors $1.5bn, roughly $3,000 per work, a landmark sum that still amounts to a sliver of its valuation.
Not everyone is suing, though. Many outlets have signed licensing deals with AI firms, and even Getty Images struck a pact with a company it had sued, while regulators pursue their own remedies, such as France’s €250m fine against Google.
That split, sue or license, is the industry’s central bet on its own future. A sanctions ruling against OpenAI would not settle the copyright question, but it could hand publishers leverage they have so far struggled to find.
