News outlets ask a judge to sanction OpenAI in their landmark copyright fight
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 […] This story continues at The Next Web
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.
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 .
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.
