The NYT Sues OpenAI and Microsoft

The New York Times is suing Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement, alleging that the two businesses "copied and used millions" of the newspaper's articles to create their AI models, and as a result, "directly compete" with its content.

According to the complaint, the Times claims that ChatGPT and Copilot are powered by Microsoft's and OpenAI's large language models (LLMs), which "can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style." The Times claims that this "undermine[s] and damage[s]" its relationship with readers and denies it "subscription, licensing, advertising, and affiliate revenue."

Additionally, the complaint claims that by impairing news organizations' capacity to safeguard and monetize content, these AI models "threaten high-quality journalism." The lawsuit claims that "Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times's massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment" through OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing Chat, which was recently rebranded as "Copilot."

According to the lawsuit, Microsoft and OpenAI have found the release of AI models that were trained on the Times' content to be "extremely lucrative." The publication states that it has been attempting to negotiate to "ensure it received fair value for the use of its content" with both companies for months, but has not been successful in coming to an agreement.

The publication is requesting that both businesses pay "billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages" in response to their alleged copying of its works in a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement. It also requests that the court exclude the Times' work from the datasets used by Microsoft and OpenAI, and prohibit them from using it to train their AI models.