OpenAI Says It Learned of NYT Lawsuit Only by Reading About It in NYT

Though OpenAI disagrees with the claims in the New York Times Co.’s Dec. 27 copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI (see 2312270044), it views the complaint “as an opportunity to clarify our business, our intent, and how we build our technology,” said OpenAI the company Monday in its first public comments about the litigation. Microsoft and OpenAI generative AI tools rely on large-language models that were built by “copying and using” millions of the NYT copyrighted news articles, in violation of the Copyright Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other statutes, alleged the newspaper. But the New York Times Co. isn’t telling “the full story,” said OpenAI. Its discussions with the company “appeared to be progressing constructively” through the parties’ last communication Dec. 19, it said. “The negotiations focused on a high-value partnership around real-time display with attribution in ChatGPT,” in which the NYT “would gain a new way to connect with their existing and new readers, and our users would gain access to their reporting,” it said. OpenAI had explained to the publishing company that, like any single source, “their content didn't meaningfully contribute to the training of our existing models and also wouldn't be sufficiently impactful for future training,” it said. OpenAI learned about the lawsuit by reading about it in the NYT, it said. The litigation “came as a surprise and disappointment to us,” it said.