"New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement", 28 December 2023

The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft over the use of its content to train generative artificial intelligence and large-language model systems, a move that could see the company receive billions of dollars in damages.

The copyright infringement lawsuit, filed in a Manhattan federal court..., claims that while the companies copied information from many sources to build their systems, they give New York Times content “particular emphasis” and “seek to free-ride on the Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment”.

The “unlawful use” of the paper’s “copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more” to create artificial intelligence products “threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service”, the lawsuit claims.

The lawsuit contains an appeal to the “vital” importance of the Times’s independent journalism to democracy, arguing that it is “increasingly rare and valuable”.

The Times reported that its lawsuit came to fruition after an apparent breakdown in negotiations over the companies’ use of Times material. In the filing, the Times said it had approached the tech firms about the use of its intellectual property to explore “an amicable resolution”, including commercial agreements and “guardrails” around AI products – but the discussions had stalled.

The lawsuit also broaches the issue of AI “hallucinations”, typically false information that can be wrongly attributed to a source, that it said potentially damages the Times’s brand. It identified material on Microsoft’s Bing Chat that it claims was misidentified as Times content, including results for “the 15 most heart-healthy foods”. Twelve of those had not been mentioned in the Times story, the lawsuit claims.

The Times lawsuit does not contain a monetary claim, but says that OpenAI, valued at $80bn, and its partner Microsoft, valued at $2.8tn, should be held responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages”.

The suit also called on the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from the Times.

Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment.

“We respect the rights of content creators and owners,” OpenAI said in an emailed statement. “Our ongoing conversations with the New York Times have been productive and moving forward constructively, so we are surprised and disappointed with this development.”