A group of publishers led by The New York Times is turning up the heat in its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
According to Benzinga, the New York Times-led publishers are escalating their copyright fight by asking the court to impose sanctions on OpenAI. Sanctions are penalties a judge can order when one side believes the other has broken the rules of litigation.
The reason for that request is spelled out by World IP Review, which reports that the Times has accused OpenAI of lying and destroying evidence. Those are serious allegations in a legal case, because evidence — including data about how an AI system was built and what material it was trained on — is central to proving whether copyrighted work was used without permission.
The dispute is part of a broader wave of legal challenges over how artificial intelligence companies gather the text, images and other content used to train their models. Publishers argue that their journalism was used to build commercial AI tools without consent or payment; AI firms have generally defended their practices.
The sources here do not detail OpenAI's response to the sanctions request or the specific evidence at issue, and those points remain to be seen as the case proceeds.
Why it matters: The outcome could help set the ground rules for whether news organizations get paid when their work is used to train AI, shaping the future relationship between journalism and the technology reshaping it.