NYT v. Microsoft, OpenAI et al. is a copyright suit filed by The New York Times Company against Microsoft and OpenAI in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the first major US news-publisher copyright case against a frontier AI developer. Core copyright claims survived a motion to dismiss in April 2025, and the case is consolidated within a multidistrict litigation (MDL) of news-organization plaintiffs. Summary-judgment briefing closed in April 2026, and in July 2026 the publisher plaintiffs moved to sanction OpenAI over alleged withholding and destruction of evidence.
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Case number | 1:23-cv-11195 (S.D.N.Y.) |
| Consolidated MDL | 1:25-md-03143 — In re: OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation |
| Plaintiff | The New York Times Company (represented by Susman Godfrey; Rothwell Figg) |
| Defendants | Microsoft Corporation; OpenAI, Inc. and nine affiliated entities |
| Judges | Sidney H. Stein (district); Ona T. Wang (magistrate) |
| Filed | December 27, 2023 |
| Status | Active — summary-judgment briefing closed April 2, 2026; sanctions motion pending (July 2026) |
Background
The New York Times Company alleges that millions of Times articles were ingested for training, including via overweighted Common Crawl segments. Exhibit J to the complaint sets out roughly 100 examples of GPT-4 and Bing Chat producing near-verbatim Times text, including the 2019 Pulitzer-winning NYC taxi-lending investigation, the "iEconomy" Apple series, paywalled recent articles, and Wirecutter recommendations. The complaint also alleges hallucinated attributions — fabricated "quotes" and Wirecutter picks falsely ascribed to the Times — which ground the trademark-dilution claim.
The case is the first major US news-publisher copyright suit against a frontier AI lab, and it has framed the doctrinal approach for subsequent publisher suits, including those brought by Alden, the Daily News, the Intercept, and the Center for Investigative Reporting. The survival of core claims at the motion-to-dismiss stage indicated that a theory combining "memorization" with a "substitutive market effect" is a viable basis for AI copyright liability, working against a defense resting purely on transformative use. The case serves as the anchor case in AI Copyright Litigation — Analysis.
Claims
The complaint pleads six causes of action:
- Direct copyright infringement (17 U.S.C. § 501) — against Microsoft and OpenAI.
- Vicarious copyright infringement — against Microsoft.
- Contributory copyright infringement — against Microsoft and OpenAI.
- DMCA § 1202 — removal of copyright management information (CMI).
- Common-law unfair competition by misappropriation (hot-news doctrine).
- Trademark dilution (15 U.S.C. § 1125(c)) — based on hallucinated outputs falsely attributed to the Times.
Relief sought
The Times seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 per willful infringement, alleged to total "billions" in the aggregate; injunctive relief including destruction of infringing datasets and models; and attorneys' fees.
Procedural history
In April 2025, the core copyright claims survived OpenAI's and Microsoft's motion to dismiss. Some secondary claims were trimmed, while the primary infringement and DMCA counts proceeded.
On January 5, 2026, District Judge Sidney Stein affirmed Magistrate Judge Ona Wang's order compelling OpenAI to produce 20 million anonymized ChatGPT logs, about 0.5% of preserved logs, across the consolidated MDL, over OpenAI's privacy and reconsideration objections. The court held that logs across a broad range of queries are discoverable because they bear on OpenAI's fair-use defense — specifically, whether ChatGPT outputs compete with or substitute for copyrighted works. The order covers the news-organization plaintiffs within the MDL, including NYT, the Chicago Tribune, and others (Source: news.bloomberglaw.com; natlawreview.com).
The discovery order was the first instance of a court compelling large-scale production of user-generated AI outputs, as opposed to training data alone, in an AI copyright case. The 20-million-log dataset is described as the empirical foundation for the "memorization + substitutive market effect" theory: plaintiffs must show that ChatGPT outputs, in the wild, actually substitute for copyrighted works, and the breadth of the production order means OpenAI cannot limit discovery to logs already known to contain plaintiffs' material. This shifts the regurgitation question from the anecdotal basis of Exhibit J toward a statistical one.
Discovery continued through spring 2026. In March 2026, the Times won a bid for a diary kept by OpenAI's president in connection with the consolidated copyright suits, and OpenAI was separately ordered to produce testimony from the Musk v. Altman litigation (Source: news.bloomberglaw.com). Expert reports were due November 14, 2025, and summary-judgment briefing closed on April 2, 2026 under the scheduling order; on April 8, 2026, Magistrate Judge Wang granted the news-organization and consolidated author plaintiffs additional deposition time after finding OpenAI's Rule 30(b)(6) corporate designee unprepared on noticed topics, ordering OpenAI to produce a properly prepared witness (Source: ailawsuittracker.com).
Sanctions motion (July 2026)
On July 9, 2026, a group of publisher plaintiffs led by the Times and the New York Daily News asked the court to sanction OpenAI, alleging it withheld and destroyed key evidence in the copyright dispute (Source: reuters.com). The publishers allege OpenAI concealed internal tools and datasets that could identify copyrighted journalism in ChatGPT outputs (Source: techcrunch.com). Daily News attorney Steven Lieberman said the motion "asks the court to punish OpenAI for hiding and destroying evidence" (Source: reuters.com). Per Ars Technica's account of the filing, the plaintiffs allege OpenAI concealed for two years its ability to search ChatGPT logs — including undisclosed samples of 10 million and 78 million logs — applied 19 billion AI-generated redactions to the sample it did produce, and deleted logs despite a preservation order; OpenAI called the allegations "blatantly false" (Source: arstechnica.com). The motion's resolution was pending as of July 10, 2026.
Source summary
A full case summary with claims and exhibits is in NYT v. OpenAI and Microsoft — Complaint (Dec 2023) (sources/).
Relationships
- supports: AI Copyright, AI Copyright Litigation — Analysis, Training Data Walls, AB 2013 — Training Data Documentation (California).
- depends-on: AI Copyright.
- related: OpenAI, Microsoft, AI in Journalism and Media.