Microsoft, OpenAI sued by New York Times over copyright infringement

The New York Times on Wednesday filed a lawsuit in federal court against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the companies used the Times’ content to train artificial intelligence (AI) models without permission, infringing the outlet’s copyrights in the process.

The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, claims that OpenAI, the maker of generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, and its financial backer Microsoft infringed the Times’ copyrights by building training datasets containing millions of copies of its copyrighted content. The outlet also claims that its copyrights were violated by the output of generative AI tools like ChatGPT.

"Defendants’ generative artificial intelligence ("GenAI") rely on large-language models ("LLMs") that were built by copying and using millions of The Times’ copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides and more," the complaint states.