New York Times Says OpenAI Erased Potential Lawsuit Evidence

Lawsuits are never exactly a lovefest, but the copyright fight between The New York Times and both OpenAI and Microsoft is getting especially contentious. This week, the Times alleged that OpenAI’s engineers inadvertently erased data the paper’s team spent more than 150 hours extracting as potential evidence.

OpenAI was able to recover much of the data, but the Times’ legal team says it’s still missing the original file names and folder structure. According to a declaration filed to the court Wednesday by Jennifer B. Maisel, a lawyer for the newspaper, this means the information “cannot be used to determine where the news plaintiffs’ copied articles” may have been incorporated into OpenAI’s artificial intelligence models.

“We disagree with the characterizations made and will file our response soon,” OpenAI spokesperson Jason Deutrom told WIRED in a statement. The New York Times declined to comment.

The Times filed its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft last year, alleging that the companies had illegally used its articles to train artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT. The case is one of many ongoing legal battles between AI companies and publishers, including a similar lawsuit filed by the Daily News being handled by some of the same lawyers.

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