OpenAI accidentally erases potential evidence in training data lawsuit

By Kylie Robison , a senior AI reporter working with The Verge's policy and tech teams. She previously worked at Fortune Magazine and Business Insider.

In a stunning misstep, OpenAI engineers accidentally erased critical evidence gathered by The New York Times and other major newspapers in their lawsuit over AI training data, according to a court filing Wednesday.

The newspapers’ legal teams had spent over 150 hours searching through OpenAI’s AI training data to find instances where their news articles were included, the filing claims. But it doesn’t explain how this mistake occurred or what precisely the data included. While the filing says OpenAI admitted to the error and tried to recover the data, what it managed to salvage was incomplete and unreliable — so what was recovered cannot help properly trace how the news organizations’ articles were used in building OpenAI’s AI models. While OpenAI’s lawyers characterized the data erasure as a “glitch,” The New York Times’ attorneys noted they had “no reason to believe” it was intentional.

The New York Times Company launched this landmark battle last December, claiming OpenAI and its partner Microsoft had built their AI tools by “copying and using millions” of the publication’s articles and now “directly compete” with its content as a result. The publication is asking for OpenAI to be held liable for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” for allegedly copying its works. 

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