Organisation · company · US

The New York Times

The New York Times, in this record chiefly as the news publisher that took OpenAI to court over training on its journalism and became the leading test of AI and copyright.

8 entries · January 2020 – December 2025

The New York Times appears in this record mainly as a litigant. In December 2023 it became the first major news organisation to sue an AI developer, accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of copyright infringement for training on millions of its articles, and its complaint stood out for including examples in which the models reproduced Times articles near-verbatim. A judge let the core infringement claims proceed in 2025, and the case became the most closely watched test of whether training a commercial model on copyrighted text is fair use — with the paper's refusal to license, while rivals such as News Corp signed deals with OpenAI, making it the conspicuous holdout. It has since sued Perplexity on similar grounds, and its journalism has shaped the field in other ways too, notably the 2020 investigation that exposed the facial-recognition company Clearview AI.

Category
Media & rightsholders
Founded
1851
HQ
New York, US
Key people
A. G. Sulzberger, Meredith Kopit Levien

Appears alongside

Featured in threads

Tracks

  • Courts & copyright 8
  • Culture & impact 1

  1. New York Times sues Perplexity for copyright infringement

    The suit, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleged near-verbatim reproduction of Times articles and separately accused Perplexity of fabricating claims falsely attributed to the paper.

    Courts & copyright

  2. OpenAI accuses the New York Times of invading user privacy in discovery dispute

    The dispute followed a magistrate judge's order that OpenAI hand over 20 million anonymised ChatGPT logs, rather than the keyword-filtered subset OpenAI had proposed.

    Courts & copyright

  3. OpenAI responds publicly to New York Times demand for user chat data

    Chief operating officer Brad Lightcap called the retention order an overreach and said OpenAI was appealing it while continuing to build privacy protections.

    Courts & copyright

  4. Judge orders OpenAI to preserve all ChatGPT logs in NYT copyright case

    Magistrate Judge Ona Wang ordered indefinite retention of chats users had deleted, calling roughly 20 million logs relevant to the New York Times' copyright claims.

    Courts & copyright

  5. Judge lets most of NYT's copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft proceed

    Judge Sidney Stein dismissed some DMCA and unfair-competition claims but let direct and contributory infringement claims proceed toward discovery, rejecting a fair-use ruling at this stage.

    Courts & copyright

  6. Copyright cases against OpenAI consolidated into a single New York MDL

    The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation centred the New York Times, Daily News, Authors Guild and related author suits before Judge Sidney Stein, who already had six of the cases.

    Courts & copyright

  7. The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft

    The first major news organisation to sue over AI training data, alleging models could reproduce its articles near-verbatim.

    Courts & copyright

  8. The New York Times exposes Clearview AI

    A facial recognition company had scraped billions of photos from social media and sold identification to police forces.

    Culture & impact · Courts & copyright

Also mentioned in 10 entries

Referenced in passing — The New York Times isn't the main subject of these.