On Thursday, multiple news organizations accused OpenAI of withholding evidence about how the company trains its artificial intelligence models in a new motion that's connected to a series of ongoing copyright lawsuits.
The motion was filed by 17 publishers, including The New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and Ziff Davis (CNET's parent company). Ziff Davis sued OpenAI in 2025, alleging that OpenAI scraped its copyrighted works to train ChatGPT and other large language models.
The initial lawsuit dates back to 2023 when The New York Times first sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the companies built their AI technologies using millions of news articles written by journalists. Microsoft and OpenAI have denied the claims.
The motion asks the court to impose legal sanctions against OpenAI, but not Microsoft, for allegedly withholding evidence, such as datasets and output logs, and claims that "OpenAI chose obstruction" by failing to produce it. If those sanctions are granted, OpenAI could be ordered to pay financial penalties.
"This motion asks the court to punish OpenAI for hiding and destroying evidence showing how ChatGPT was trained on stolen journalism," New York Daily News attorney Steven Lieberman said, per the Associated Press.
At the center of the lawsuits is how generative AI, such as ChatGPT, is trained and how it sources its information. The Times' original lawsuit claims that OpenAI's generative AI tools "can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style," raising questions of copyright infringement.
The lawsuits come amid a broader conversation in the journalism industry: declining traffic across digital media outlets. AI overviews are often cited as a major reason for the decline in clicks to original reporting by writers and editors, which in turn impacts publishers' advertising revenue.
A growing reliance on AI chatbots for finding news and other content is also a major concern for publishers, as it siphons off loyal readership and audience. Some data shows that small publishers have been hit the hardest, with a reported 60% traffic drop, while another analysis predicts traffic declines of more than 40% by 2029.
A statement by Ziff Davis notes that "OpenAI has copied and monetized Ziff Davis content without permission on a massive scale." Lance Koonce, partner at Klaris Law and counsel for Ziff Davis, said that, since the lawsuit, "OpenAI repeatedly lied about its ability to search its own data sets for Ziff Davis content and engaged in other serious litigation misconduct."
An ongoing debate over copyright and AI #
OpenAI has long maintained that AI training is fair use. An OpenAI spokesperson denied the allegations in a statement to CNET, stating: "As the Times' case weakens and they've been forced to drop claims against us, they're persisting with their efforts to invade the privacy of people who have nothing to do with this case, including by making these blatantly false allegations." The statement went on to say: "We'll continue defending our users' privacy and the long-established principles of fair use."
In a 2024 rebuttal to the original lawsuit filed by The New York Times, OpenAI said the publisher falsely accused the company of destroying data and instead accused the newspaper of "secretly" deleting its own data that would have shown internal use of OpenAI products. Although the Times has dropped one claim against OpenAI, the larger lawsuit remains in litigation.
Other tech giants, including Meta, have also been accused by authors and news publishers of copyright infringement. Many of those cases are still in litigation as courts decide where to draw the line between fair use and infringement in the age of AI.