OpenAI ChatGPT Copyright Lawsuit: The New York Times Case

What the Lawsuits Allege

In December 2023, The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft, alleging that millions of its copyrighted articles were copied to train the AI behind ChatGPT, and that the system can reproduce Times content and now competes with the Times as an information source. Groups of book authors and other publishers brought similar claims, and many were consolidated in Manhattan federal court. The core allegation is that training an AI on copyrighted work, without a license, is infringement.

OpenAI counters that using publicly available material to train a model is protected “fair use,” and has argued that the Times used unusual prompts to make the model reproduce its text.

The Status and Stakes

The litigation is ongoing, with no final judgment. A judge allowed core claims to proceed past OpenAI’s motion to dismiss, keeping the fair-use fight alive for later stages. A separate flashpoint is a court order about preserving ChatGPT user data, which OpenAI has resisted on user-privacy grounds. The outcome could shape whether AI companies must license training data — and how much they pay — across the industry.

Few civil cases carry this much weight for an entire technology sector.

What It Means

For creators, the case tests whether their work can be used to build commercial AI without consent or payment. For users, one side issue is data retention: litigation can require a company to preserve records it would otherwise delete. There is no consumer claim to join — this is a copyright fight between rights-holders and AI companies, watched as a bellwether for the whole field.