New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft for infringing copyrighted works

The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright infringement, seeking to end the companies’ practice of using its stories to train chatbots.

The newspaper filed a lawsuit in the United States federal court in Manhattan on Wednesday, alleging the companies’ powerful artificial intelligence (AI) models used millions of its articles for training without permission and saying that copyright infringements at the paper alone could be worth billions.

The Times said OpenAI and Microsoft are advancing their technology through the “unlawful use of The Times’s work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it” and “threatens The Times’s ability to provide that service”.

Through their AI chatbots, the companies “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 lawsuit said.

The Times, one of the most respected news organisations in the United States, is seeking damages as well as an order that the companies stop using its content – and destroy data already harvested.

While no sum is specifically requested, the Times alleged that the infringement could have cost “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages”.

With the suit, The New York Times chose a more confrontational approach to the sudden rise of AI chatbots, in contrast to other media groups, such as Germany’s Axel Springer or The Associated Press, which have struck content deals with OpenAI.

Microsoft, the world’s second biggest company by market capitalisation, is a major investor in OpenAI and swiftly implemented the powers of AI in its own products after the release of ChatGPT last year.

The AI models that power ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot (formerly Bing) were trained for years on content available on the internet under the assumption that it was fair to be used without need for compensation.