In simple terms, the newspapers claim that ChatGPT was trained on millions of news stories, investigations and articles available online without authorization or payment—conduct the publishers describe as the unauthorized appropriation, or “piracy,” of their journalistic work.
⚠️ It is important to clarify that these are allegations made in an ongoing lawsuit, not a final court ruling against OpenAI.
According to the plaintiffs, the company may have deleted datasets and internal logs that could reveal how ChatGPT used protected material during its training. The newspapers are therefore asking the judge to punish OpenAI for alleged misconduct during the legal discovery process.
The media companies argue that OpenAI and its partner Microsoft built powerful artificial intelligence systems using enormous quantities of content produced over many years by reporters, photographers and editors—without compensating the organizations that paid to create that journalism.
THE CENTRAL CONFLICT: CHATGPT CAN ANSWER WITHOUT SENDING READERS TO THE NEWSPAPER
The dispute is not only about how artificial intelligence models are trained. Publishers also argue that tools such as ChatGPT can summarize, reproduce or answer questions based on their articles, giving users less reason to visit the original news websites.
That could mean fewer readers, less digital traffic and lower revenue from advertising and subscriptions. According to the newspapers, AI systems are now competing with the same publications whose reporting helped supply their information.
Concerns have increased with the spread of AI-generated summaries in search engines, where users can receive an immediate answer without clicking through to the original source.
A MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR LEGAL BATTLE
The New York Times has reportedly spent more than $28 million on legal disputes involving artificial intelligence companies. Its lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft began in 2023 and has become one of the most important copyright cases of the AI era.
The newspaper accuses the companies of using its journalism as free raw material to develop commercial products that could partially replace traditional news organizations.
OpenAI rejects the allegations and argues that training its models on publicly available material is protected under the U.S. legal principle of fair use. The company also says it protects user privacy and denies wrongdoing.
Publishers, however, warn that allowing AI companies to use their work without payment could weaken the news industry and make it harder to finance investigations, foreign bureaus and professional reporting.
PIRACY OR FAIR USE?
The case could help determine the rules for the entire artificial intelligence industry: whether companies may train their systems on books, photographs, music and news articles found online, or whether they must obtain permission and pay licensing fees.
Some AI companies have already chosen to negotiate. Anthropic, an OpenAI competitor, agreed to pay $1.5 billion to book authors in a dispute involving the training of its Claude chatbot.
OpenAI has also signed licensing agreements with certain media organizations, while other publishers continue pursuing legal action.
The question dividing the technology and journalism industries is direct:
Is ChatGPT revolutionizing access to information—or building a multibillion-dollar business by allegedly “pirating” the work of newspapers such as The New York Times?
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