A group of roughly 16 news organizations, with The New York Times at the helm, filed a motion on July 9 seeking sanctions against OpenAI in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The publishers claim the ChatGPT maker hid evidence, misrepresented its technical capabilities, and may have deleted or failed to preserve around 20 million conversation logs that could prove copyright infringement.
What the publishers are alleging
The coalition, which includes the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune alongside the Times, accuses OpenAI of concealing its ability to search training datasets for over two years. When asked whether it could identify copyrighted materials used to train its models, OpenAI allegedly said it couldn’t. The publishers now claim that was false.
The missing conversation logs are central to the dispute. Those 20 million ChatGPT output logs, the publishers argue, could demonstrate that OpenAI’s models reproduced or closely mimicked copyrighted news articles. Without them, the plaintiffs say they’re being denied evidence essential to their case.
The sanctions motion asks for monetary penalties, including attorneys’ fees, and adverse findings. In plain English: the publishers want the court to assume the missing logs would have supported their infringement claims. That kind of ruling could be devastating for OpenAI’s defense.
