The New York Times, the Daily News, the Denver Post, and their sister papers are asking a federal judge to hit OpenAI with "serious sanctions" for allegedly hiding and destroying evidence in a landmark copyright fight — and the stakes couldn't be higher for who controls information in America.
This is the same establishment press that spent years lobbying Big Tech to deplatform independent voices and suppress stories that didn't fit the narrative. Now they want the courts to punish an AI company for training on publicly available content — content these outlets published to the open internet. The game is simple: silence competitors through censorship, and own the raw material that powers the next generation of information access.
At issue is a motion filed Thursday in Manhattan federal court. The newspapers allege OpenAI "chose obstruction" rather than release datasets and ChatGPT logs showing how its AI system used copyrighted news articles. According to the filing, an OpenAI expert — John Vincent "Vinnie" Monaco — "finally revealed" in an April deposition that the company spent two years misrepresenting its ability to search its own training data for stolen journalism and destroyed millions of chat histories.
"For two years, OpenAI has been making misrepresentations to the court regarding its ability to search for Daily News content in its training datasets and output logs — key evidence concerning OpenAI's theft of copyrighted content," said Steven Lieberman, attorney for the Daily News and affiliated MediaNews Group papers.
The outlets want monetary sanctions and special jury instructions. Judge Ona Wang had previously ordered privacy protections for ChatGPT users' data — protections OpenAI cited while simultaneously claiming that any regurgitated news stories were just "a rare bug," according to court filings.
OpenAI didn't respond to a request for comment Thursday.
The underlying lawsuit, filed in late 2023, accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of building substitutive AI products that siphon web traffic without doing the reporting work. The Times alone has burned over $28 million litigating against AI companies, according to financial disclosures.
OpenAI and other tech companies argue that training AI on internet content is protected by the "fair use" doctrine — the same legal principle that lets search engines index the web. It's being tested in dozens of lawsuits with mixed results. The biggest settlement so far: OpenAI rival Anthropic agreed to pay book authors $1.5 billion for training its chatbot Claude on pirated works — a fraction of Anthropic's reported $965 billion valuation ahead of a public offering.
The Times frames its case differently from book authors. Its amended complaint targets companies that "seek to free-ride on The Times's massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment."
Translation: the gatekeepers want to keep the gates.
The Denver Post and New York Daily News leaned hard into the "deception" framing, emphasizing Monaco's admissions and the destruction of chat logs. The Associated Press and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review played it straighter, foregrounding the broader copyright stakes. None of the outlets mentioned the irony of newspapers that demanded Silicon Valley censor their competitors now running to those same courts to protect their monopoly on the written word.
The real question for ordinary Americans isn't whether OpenAI played dirty in discovery — it's whether a handful of legacy outlets should control who gets to read, synthesize, and share the news, and at what price.