The New York Times is editing a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft
The New York Times amended its lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft on Thursday, amending one claim against Microsoft and dropping another against OpenAI, according to a legal filing in federal court.
The Times he sued In late 2023, OpenAI and Microsoft accused tech companies of infringing their copyrights by using millions of its articles to train AI technologies, including the ChatGPT chatbot. Artificial intelligence technologies are now competing with The Times as a source of information, the newspaper argued in its lawsuit.
The Times claimed in its lawsuit that OpenAI and Microsoft infringed its copyright. The media company also accused Microsoft of “contributory” infringement, in part because it provided the computing power that OpenAI used to build its AI technologies.
In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday, The Times accused Microsoft of encouraging OpenAI to train its AI systems using copyrighted articles from The Times and of providing services designed to help with that training.
The Times also withdrew its original lawsuit, filed in 2023, accusing OpenAI of “secondary” infringement of its copyrights by failing to prevent consumers and businesses from creating copyrighted material with AI.
“As we’ve long argued, Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal our copyrighted works,” Graham James, a Times spokesman, said in a statement. “In addition to editing this claim and streamlining the case to its strongest arguments, our core claims remain the same as of the date we filed this lawsuit.”
OpenAI spokesman Drew Pusateri said in a statement Thursday: “Our models encourage innovation, are trained on publicly available data, and are based on the principle of fair use.”
Microsoft spokesman Frank X. Shaw added: “These allegations have been thoroughly investigated during a year-long discovery process and are without merit. This is the plaintiff’s latest attempt to salvage its claim from the adverse precedent set in other recent rulings.”
OpenAI and Microsoft have previously denied wrongdoing, saying they respect the rights of content creators. OpenAI also argued in a court filing that ChatGPT is not a substitute for a Times subscription.
The Times was the first major US media company to sue OpenAI over copyright issues related to its written works. Journalists, computer programmers, and other groups have also filed copyright infringement lawsuits against OpenAI and other companies that create AI technologies. Now there are more than 40 cases across the country.
In a September settlement, Antropic, one of OpenAI’s main rivals, agreed to pay $1.5 billion to a group of authors and publishers after a court ruled it illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books.
In December, The Times filed another lawsuit, claiming its copyright was repeatedly infringed by Perplexity, the AI startup that built the Internet search engine.
Like other AI companies, OpenAI built its technologies by feeding them vast amounts of digital data, some of which is copyrighted. AI companies have long argued that they can legally use copyrighted material to train their systems without paying for it because they have repurposed the material for other uses.
Accusing OpenAI of violating its copyright on Thursday, The Times cited several examples of an OpenAI chatbot providing users with near-verbatim excerpts of its articles that would otherwise require a paid subscription.