The New York Times and several news outlets on Thursday filed a motion for sanctions against OpenAI, accusing the company of concealing its ability to search the training datasets and output logs for its models for more than two years as they sought company documents.
The motion’s plaintiffs included the Times, the Daily News, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Intercept and digital publisher and CNET parent Ziff Davis. The 52-page document, filed in the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York, claimed that OpenAI’s lying only came to light after a second deposition from Vinnie Monaco, who leads privacy engineering at the company. In that February deposition, the outlets said Monaco revealed OpenAI had searched training datasets and output data despite the company’s initial claims that it couldn’t access that data. The outlets also alleged OpenAI deleted logs, a violation of the court’s preservation orders.
“Instead of just producing that evidence at the start of the case and focusing on the merits of its fair use defense, OpenAI chose obstruction,” the news organizations, through their attorneys, wrote.
The outlets asked the court to recognize the company made false claims and deleted output logs, award them attorneys’ fees and impose any other punishment the court deems fit.
“Each of the remedies requested is an appropriate exercise of this Court’s inherent authority and necessary both in response to OpenAI’s misconduct and as a deterrent to those who might contemplate following their example,” the outlets added.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Crosby, lead attorney for the New York Times, said in a statement that OpenAI “lied to The Times, The Daily News Plaintiffs, the public, and the court.”
“It claimed searching ChatGPT outputs for copies of The Times’ and the Daily News Plaintiffs’ content was infeasible, burdensome, and invasive of users’ privacy – while at the same time concealing that it had already done such searches,” said Crosby, a partner at Susman Godfrey. “If OpenAI genuinely believed that copying our clients’ journalism was fair and legal, it wouldn’t have hid the truth about having done it.”
The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, becoming the first news outlet to bring legal action against the generative AI company to protect its copyright. The Daily News, Center for Investigative Reporting and Ziff Davis filed separate suits in 2024 alleging similar behavior. The Times has spent more than $28 million on litigation costs against AI companies, $4.2 million of which came during 2026’s first financial quarter.
Many news outlets have tried to walk a line between protecting their work and partnering with AI companies for licensing opportunities as AI chatbots and summaries eat into digital traffic and the advertising dollars that accompany it. The Times, which has also sued AI company Perplexity for similar alleged infringement, struck a content-licensing deal with Amazon for “AI-related uses” last year, and it is also developing its own use cases for the technology within its newsroom.
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