New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft over the use of its content to train generative artificial intelligence and large-language model systems, a move that could see the company receive billions of dollars in damages.

The copyright infringement lawsuit, filed in a Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, claims that while the companies copied information from many sources to build their systems, they give New York Times content “particular emphasis” and “seek to free-ride on the Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment”.

The “unlawful use” of the paper’s “copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more” to create artificial intelligence products “threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service”, the lawsuit claims.