OpenAI staff recognized AI’s existential threat to publishers, New York Times claims in ongoing lawsuit

OpenAI employees were apparently well aware that their technology posed a serious threat to the publishers whose content helped build it. That’s the picture emerging from discovery materials in The New York Times’ landmark copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, where internal documents suggest the AI company had more visibility into its use of copyrighted material than it initially let on. What discovery uncovered The Times originally filed its copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, alleging that the companies used NYT articles spanning from 1928 to 2024 to train models like ChatGPT without authorization. The core claim: this practice siphons traffic and revenue from the original journalism that made the training data valuable in the first place. What makes the latest developments particularly thorny for OpenAI is what emerged during depositions. In July 2026, testimony revealed that OpenAI had conducted internal searches for copyrighted content before the lawsuit was even filed. That directly contradicts earlier representations that the company could not effectively monitor what was in its training data. Discovery also surfaced the e...