The New York Times, The New York Daily News and 15 other media organisations have filed a motion in a Manhattan federal court asking Judge Sidney H. Stein to impose sanctions on OpenAI, alleging it withheld and destroyed evidence central to their landmark AI copyright case.
What The Publishers Allege
The publishers say OpenAI misled the court by asserting it lacked the capability to search its systems for copyrighted material — a claim they call demonstrably false, given that OpenAI had performed exactly those searches before any of the news organisations sued. An OpenAI employee later testified that the company had "performed multiple searches for News Plaintiffs' content." The plaintiffs also contend OpenAI made billions of ChatGPT exchanges inaccessible, either by deleting them or stripping them of searchability.
Remedies On The Table
The newspapers are asking for attorneys' fees plus a court finding that OpenAI's chat logs show the company misused their copyrighted works — a determination that would materially strengthen their case as it moves toward trial. OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri denied the allegations, arguing the Times is trying to "invade the privacy of people who have nothing to do with this case" and vowing to keep defending "our users' privacy and the long-established principles of fair use."
A Fair-Use Precedent For The Whole AI Industry
A ruling on sanctions could ripple across every generative-AI company facing discovery over training data. The push lands the same week rival OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6 and ChatGPT Work after a government review, and just after Apple sued OpenAI over hardware trade secrets — leaving OpenAI now fighting on multiple legal fronts at once.
Reporting based on The New York Times, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera and Reuters coverage.