The New York Times demands sanctions against OpenAI for evidence concealment

The New York Times demands sanctions against OpenAI for concealing evidence

The New York Times, Daily News and other leading American publishers filed a motion with the federal court in New York asking for sanctions against OpenAI, accusing the company of concealing key evidence in the copyright infringement lawsuit.

Accusations against OpenAI

In the court document, publishers claim that the company "chose obstruction" — deliberate obstruction of justice. Instead of providing datasets used in training ChatGPT, OpenAI is concealing this information from the court. Publishers believe that this data is critically important for proving their main argument: that OpenAI used copyrighted content from their newspapers without license, permission, and compensation to authors.

• Main accusation: concealment of datasets for ChatGPT training
• Plaintiffs: The New York Times, Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Las Vegas Review-Journal and many other publishers
• Court: federal court of New York County on Manhattan
• Core of dispute: the legality of using copyrighted content in training AI models

What are judicial sanctions

Sanctions in civil litigation are not just a fine. This is a punishment for contempt of court and violation of its orders. Sanctions are applied as a measure of legal coercion to compel parties to comply with court decisions. If a judge finds that OpenAI intentionally concealed key evidence, the company faces monetary penalties, procedural restrictions (such as a ban on using certain arguments in defense), or an adverse inference — when the court presumes that the concealed materials contained information in favor of plaintiffs. Any of these scenarios would significantly reduce OpenAI's chances of winning.

History of the copyright dispute and AI training

The New York Times filed the first lawsuit in December 2023, accusing OpenAI of using millions of articles from the newspaper's archive to train ChatGPT without the publisher's permission and payment to authors. Soon dozens of other publishers joined the suit: New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Las Vegas Review-Journal, The Intercept and many other major newspapers and magazines.

This became one of the largest lawsuits in AI industry history. The central question remains open: do companies have the right to use published copyrighted content to train large language models? Does this require publishers' licenses and author compensation? Regulators in the US, Europe and other countries are actively seeking the answer, but no unified international standard exists yet.

Possible consequences

If the court sides with publishers, it will require a complete review of the practice of training large language models. AI companies will have to either pay publishers for content, obtain explicit licenses before use, or completely exclude copyrighted content from training datasets. This could radically change the economics of AI development, reduce availability of quality training data, and slow the development of new models.

What this means

The outcome of this case could become a global precedent. The decision of the American federal court will be taken into account by AI companies around the world, including developers of Claude, DeepSeek, Meta and other market leaders. The impact will be particularly noticeable in the United States, where copyright law has the greatest force. The outcome of the dispute will affect the business models of startups, volumes of investment in AI development, and the strategy of using training data for years to come.

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