In a new motion, the New York Times, Ziff Davis and 15 other media organizations say OpenAI “has chosen to be stonewalled” on the details of how it trains its AI models.
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Corin Cesaric-Epple is a writer at CNET who covers home and kitchen technology and meal kits, and regularly reports on artificial intelligence. She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Before joining CNET, she covered crime for People Magazine and national and international news for local NBC television stations.
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Several news organizations on Thursday accused OpenAI of withholding evidence about how the company trains its artificial intelligence models as part of a new motion related to a series of ongoing copyright lawsuits.
The petition was filed by 17 publishers, including the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and Ziff Davis (CNET’s parent company). Ziff Davis sued OpenAI in 2025, alleging that OpenAI removed its copyrighted works to train ChatGPT and other large language models.
The original lawsuit dates back to 2023, when The New York Times first sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the companies built their AI technologies using millions of news articles written by journalists. Microsoft and OpenAI have denied the allegations.
The motion asks the court to impose legal sanctions against OpenAI, but not Microsoft, for allegedly withholding evidence, such as datasets and output logs, and asserts that “OpenAI chose obstruction” by not producing it. If these sanctions are granted, OpenAI could be ordered to pay financial penalties.
“This motion asks the court to punish OpenAI for hiding and destroying evidence showing how ChatGPT was trained in stolen journalism,” New York Daily News attorney Steven Lieberman said, according to the Associated Press.
At the center of the lawsuits is how generative AI, such as ChatGPT, is trained and how it obtains its information. The Times’ initial lawsuit claims that OpenAI’s generative AI tools “can generate output that recites The Times’ content verbatim, faithfully summarizes it, and imitates its expressive style,” raising questions of copyright infringement.
The lawsuits come amid a broader debate in the journalism industry: declining traffic on digital media. AI insights are often cited as one of the main reasons for declining clicks on original reports by writers and publishers, impacting publishers’ ad revenue.
The growing reliance on AI chatbots to find news and other content is also a major concern for publishers, as it siphons off loyal readership and audiences. Some data shows that small publishers have been hit the hardest, with a reported traffic drop of 60%, while another analysis projects a traffic drop of more than 40% by 2029.
A statement from Ziff Davis notes that “OpenAI copied and monetized Ziff Davis content without permission on a large scale.” Lance Koonce, a partner at Klaris Law and an attorney for Ziff Davis, said that since the lawsuit, “OpenAI has repeatedly lied about its ability to search its own data sets for Ziff Davis content and has engaged in other serious legal misconduct.”
An ongoing debate about copyright and AI
OpenAI has long maintained that AI training is fair use. An OpenAI spokesperson denied the allegations in a statement to CNET, saying: “While the Times’ arguments have weakened and they have been forced to drop their lawsuit against us, they persist in their efforts to invade the privacy of people who had nothing to do with this matter, including by making these blatantly false allegations. The statement goes on to say, “We will continue to defend our users’ privacy and the long-standing principles of fair use.”
In a 2024 rebuttal to the original lawsuit filed by The New York Times, OpenAI said the publisher falsely accused the company of destroying data and instead accused the newspaper of “secretly” deleting its own data that allegedly showed internal use of OpenAI products. Although the Times dropped a lawsuit against OpenAI, the larger lawsuit remains in dispute.
Other tech giants, including Metahave also been accused by authors and press publishers of copyright infringement. Many of these cases are still being litigated as courts decide where to draw the line between fair use and infringement in the AI era.
Corin Cesaric-Epple is a writer at CNET who covers home and kitchen technology and meal kits, and regularly reports on artificial intelligence. She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Before joining CNET, she covered crime for People Magazine and national and international news for local NBC television stations. See full bio