When a court tells you to keep the receipts, you keep the receipts. OpenAI, according to a coalition of major news publishers, did not keep the receipts.
A group of plaintiffs led by The New York Times has filed a motion seeking sanctions against OpenAI, alleging the AI company deleted or failed to adequately preserve approximately 20 million ChatGPT conversation logs that a court had ordered it to retain. Those logs are central to the publishers’ claims that OpenAI scraped millions of copyrighted articles to train its flagship chatbot without permission, compensation, or so much as a courtesy email.
The evidence destruction allegations
The sanctions request stems from what the plaintiffs describe as a direct violation of preservation directives issued by the court. In May 2025, US Magistrate Judge Wang ordered OpenAI to retain ChatGPT conversation logs as evidence in the case. The publishers now argue that OpenAI failed to comply with that order, and the missing data is precisely the kind of material that could demonstrate how ChatGPT ingests and reproduces copyrighted content.
The coalition includes not just The New York Times but also the New York Daily News and other affiliated publications. The original complaint was filed on December 27, 2023, making this litigation roughly two years old at the time of the sanctions request. In that time, the case has expanded and intensified considerably, with an amended complaint filed as recently as June 25, 2026, and summary judgment briefing concluding in April 2026.
