New York Times-led group seeks sanctions against OpenAI in copyright case
A group of newspapers has asked a US court to sanction OpenAI, accusing the company of misleading the court about its ability to search for copyrighted news content in its systems.
A group of newspapers led by The New York Times has asked a federal court in Manhattan to sanction OpenAI in an ongoing copyright dispute.
According to Reuters, the newspapers claim OpenAI misled the court by saying it could not search its large language models for their copyrighted material, while allegedly having already carried out similar searches.
The filing was made on 9 July 2026. The newspapers also allege that OpenAI deleted or made unsearchable billions of ChatGPT conversations that could have been relevant to the case.
They are asking the court for sanctions, including legal fees. They also want the court to find that OpenAI’s chat logs support their claim that the company misused copyrighted news content.
OpenAI rejected the allegations. A company spokesperson said the newspapers were making false claims while continuing to seek access to user conversations. OpenAI has previously argued that turning over ChatGPT logs could raise user privacy concerns.
The lawsuit was first filed by The New York Times in 2023. It accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of news articles without permission to train AI systems behind ChatGPT.
The Times recently dropped a secondary copyright infringement claim in an amended complaint, but its broader case against OpenAI and Microsoft continues.
