The New York Times on Wednesday sued Sam Altman-run OpenAI and Satya Nadella-run Microsoft for copyright infringement.
The lawsuit alleged that OpenAI and Microsoft’s large language models (LLMs), which power ChatGPT and Copilot, “can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarises it, and mimics its expressive style.”
This “undermines and damages the Times’ relationship with readers,” said the lawsuit, adding that it also deprives the NYT of “subscription, licensing, advertising, and affiliate revenue.”
“Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism,” the complaint says, accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of “using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it.”
The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, alleged that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.
Microsoft and OpenAI did not comment on the lawsuit.
The complaint also argued that these AI models “threaten high-quality journalism” by hurting the ability of news outlets to protect and monetize content.
“Through Microsoft’s Bing Chat (recently rebranded as ‘Copilot’) 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,” the lawsuit read.
The publication is suing both companies for copyright infringement and asks them to be held liable for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” for allegedly copying its works.
