The New York Times Reportedly Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over Alleged Unauthorized AI Training on Its Content

The New York Times alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft used millions of its articles without permission to train AI models, including ChatGPT. The lawsuit claims the companies scraped and reproduced copyrighted content without compensation, in turn undermining the Times’s business and competing with its journalism. Some AI outputs allegedly regurgitate Times articles verbatim. The lawsuit seeks damages and demands the destruction of AI models trained on its content.

Risk classification

• Primary risk domain: 6 Socioeconomic & Environmental
• Primary risk subdomain: 6.3 Economic and cultural devaluation of human effort

The incident involves the unauthorized reproduction and exploitation of the Times's creative and journalistic works, directly competing with and devaluing their human effort and business model.

Additional risk subdomains

• 3.1 False or misleading information: The AI systems generated hallucinations that fabricated information and falsely attributed it to the Times, causing brand damage.

Causal factors

• Entity: Human
• Intent: Intentional
• Timing: Post-deployment

The core of the dispute stems from intentional human decisions by OpenAI and Microsoft to train their models on copyrighted articles without authorization, resulting in post-deployment competition and brand damage.

EU AI Act risk tier

• Risk tier: 3 Limited Risk

Limited Risk: The systems involved are chatbots (ChatGPT and Bing Chat) which fall under Risk Level 3 due to transparency obligations for conversational AI and generative content.

AI system and alleged parties

• AI system: Bing Chat, ChatGPT (Microsoft, OpenAI)
• AI purpose: Chatbot; Question Answering
• Behaviour type: Assistant
• Alleged developer: OpenAI, Microsoft
• Alleged deployer: OpenAI, Microsoft
• Alleged harmed parties: Writers, The New York Times, publishers, Media organizations, Journalists, Journalistic integrity, Journalism, Epistemic integrity

Harm severity

Severity ratings are based on this scale.

Highest direct severity in any category: Severe. Severity is scored from Negligible to Catastrophic in each harm category, for harm the reports describe as caused directly or indirectly by the AI system.

• Physical: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Infrastructure: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Property: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Financial: direct Severe, indirect Severe
• Environmental: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Malicious content: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Differential treatment: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Civil rights: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Democracy: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Privacy: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Psychological: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible
• Epistemic: direct Minor, indirect Severe
• Child sexual exploitation and abuse: direct Negligible, indirect Negligible

Financial

Reported: The report explicitly describes financial losses, noting that the lawsuit seeks 'billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages' and mentions lost subscription, advertising, and affiliate referral revenue.

Directly caused: The Times suffered direct financial losses from lost subscription and advertising revenue due to verbatim outputs, and lost affiliate commissions for Wirecutter.

Indirectly caused: The broader news industry has faced declining revenues and a 25 percent reduction in newsroom staff between 2008 and 2020.

Inferred additional harm: Other creative professionals and news organizations likely suffered similar unquantified financial losses from unauthorized training.

Epistemic

Reported: The report explicitly describes epistemic harm in the form of AI 'hallucinations' where chatbots insert false information and wrongly attribute it to the Times.

Directly caused: Microsoft's Bing Chat provided incorrect information about 'the 15 most heart-healthy foods,' falsely claiming 12 of them came from a Times article.

Indirectly caused: The report notes that fake news sites using AI to generate false articles have increased by over 1,000 percent, polluting the information ecosystem.

Inferred additional harm: Users relying on these hallucinated outputs may make decisions based on false beliefs, potentially leading to health or material harms.

People affected

• Occurrences reported: 1
• People reportedly harmed: 5000
• People reportedly exposed: 1000000

Potential causes

Management

• Prioritizing Growth Over Rights: Tech firms built highly lucrative tools using uncompensated creative work.
• Inadequate Risk Assessment: Failure to resolve copyright issues before commercializing AI products.

Technology

• Verbatim Output Generation: GPT-4 outputs copyrighted articles word-for-word, bypassing paywalls.
• AI Hallucinations: Models attribute false information to NYT, damaging brand reputation.
• Stripping Referral Links: Browse with Bing reproduces Wirecutter content without referral links.

Data Inputs

• Unauthorized Web Scraping: Scraping millions of copyrighted NYT articles without consent or payment.
• Lack of Dataset Transparency: Companies refuse to reveal training sources used in newer models.
• Historical Data Ingestion: Decades of online catalogs scraped before blockers could be installed.

Human Factors

• User Substitution: Users get answers from chatbots instead of visiting publisher websites.
• Impasse in Negotiations: Parties failed to reach an amicable agreement on licensing terms.

Process and Methods

• Inadequate Training Safeguards: Lack of mechanisms to prevent memorization and reproduction of texts.
• Ineffective Content Attribution: Chatbots fail to provide proper links to original source articles.

Regulatory Environment

• Unresolved Fair Use Contours: Unclear legal boundaries of generative AI training under copyright law.
• Lack of AI Compensation Standards: No standard regulatory framework for compensating creators for AI training.

Information quality

• Classification confidence: High
• Reason for confidence: The reports provide clear, detailed, and consistent accounts of the lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft, including specific examples of verbatim reproduction and hallucinations.
• Ambiguities identified: The exact monetary damages sought are not specified beyond 'billions of dollars'.

A major civil lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft alleging unauthorized use of copyrighted articles to train AI models. While raising critical questions about intellectual property, AI training data, and epistemic reliability, the incident remains a domestic commercial dispute with minor direct national security implications.

• Overall national security impact: Minor
• Scope: Single nation
• Primary target: United States
• Alleged perpetrator: OpenAI and Microsoft

Threat characteristics

• Imminence: Long-term. Represents an ongoing legal dispute and strategic concern regarding intellectual property rights and AI training data, rather than an active crisis requiring immediate national response.
• Autonomy: Human-supervised. The AI systems generate text autonomously based on user prompts, but they operate under the parameters, safety filters, and platforms controlled and monitored by their developers.
• Novelty: Evolved capability. While copyright disputes are established, the scale of training large language models on massive datasets and outputting verbatim copyrighted material represents a significant evolution in intellectual property challenges.

Impact by dimension

• Physical security: Negligible. No physical systems, infrastructure, or human safety capabilities were threatened or impacted by this copyright dispute.
• Information security: Minor. While the incident highlights the generation of false information and broader pollution of the information ecosystem, it represents a commercial IP dispute rather than an active state-sponsored information warfare campaign.
• Sovereignty: Negligible. The incident is a civil litigation between private corporate entities and does not threaten state authority, border control, or core government operations.
• Economic security: Minor. The lawsuit involves significant commercial financial claims and highlights IP disputes in the AI supply chain, but it does not threaten strategic national industries or critical financial infrastructure.
• Societal stability: Minor. The potential long-term erosion of independent journalism and the spread of AI-generated misinformation pose minor risks to societal trust, but the incident itself has not triggered civil unrest or systemic human rights violations.