New York Times Sues OpenAI And Microsoft Over Copyrighted Infringement

(RTTNews) - The New York Times on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Microsoft (MSFT) and OpenAI, the company behind popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, alleging copyright infringement over the unauthorized use of published work to train AI.

The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, claims that OpenAi used millions of articles published by The Times to train automated chatbots, which now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.

"Defendants' unlawful use of The Times's work to create artificial intelligence products that compete with it threatens The Times's ability to provide that service. Defendants' generative artificial intelligence tools rely on large-language models that were built by copying and using millions of The Times's copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more," the lawsuit reads.

"While Defendants engaged in widescale copying from many sources, they gave Times content particular emphasis when building their LLMs—revealing a preference that recognizes the value of those works. Through Microsoft's Bing Chat and OpenAI's ChatGPT, 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."

In a court filing, the publisher said it seeks to hold Microsoft and OpenAI to account for "billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages" it believes it is owed for "unlawful copying and use of The Times's uniquely valuable works."

Microsoft provided OpenAI Global LLC with a $1 billion investment in 2019 and a $10 billion investment in 2023, with a significant portion of the investment in the form of compute resources on Microsoft's Azure cloud service.