New York Times Doubles Down on AI Copyright Battle, Has Spent Over $20 Million on Legal Fight
The New York Times is taking its fight against AI companies to the courtroom, and it's not holding back on spending. Publisher A.G. Sulzberger confirmed in a recent interview that the Times has spent over $20 million on its 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, a case that accuses the companies of using the newspaper's copyrighted articles to train their AI models without permission.
The legal battle represents one of the most significant tests yet of how intellectual property laws apply to generative AI systems. The Times argues that OpenAI's models, including ChatGPT, were built in part on content scraped from its journalism—and that this constitutes copyright infringement.
Despite the steep legal costs, Sulzberger indicated the Times has no intention of backing down. The case is widely seen as a bellwether for the broader media industry, which has been grappling with questions about how AI companies should compensate publishers for using their content to train commercial AI products.
The lawsuit could have far-reaching implications for how AI companies source training data going forward, potentially forcing changes to how these systems are developed and what compensation, if any, content creators receive.