The New York Times filed a lawsuit Wednesday against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the companies of copyright infringement for training artificial intelligence models on millions of articles published by the newspaper.
The suit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of “using The Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it.”
“Defendants seek to free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism,” the complaint says, as reported by The Times.
OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, and Microsoft have yet to respond to the legal action. GeekWire reached out to Microsoft for comment and we’ll update this story when we hear back.
Microsoft has invested billions in OpenAI, and incorporates its technology into various products including Bing and Windows.
The Times reported that while the suit does not include an exact monetary demand, it says the defendants should be held responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” related to the “unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works.”
The suit calls for the companies to destroy any large language chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from The Times.
Among various examples, the lawsuit alleges that Microsoft’s “Browse with Bing” feature reproduces content from the Times’s product recommendation site Wirecutter “through substantial verbatim copying” and “substantial direct copying.” It also accuses OpenAI’s GPT-4 of falsely attributing recommendations to Wirecutter.
“Wirecutter does not receive affiliate referral revenue if a user purchases the Wirecutter-recommended product through a link on Defendants’ platforms,” the lawsuit states. “As with The Times’s other products, decreases in traffic to Wirecutter also impact its advertising and subscription revenue.”
Entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis called the suit “Open AI’s Napster moment” in a post on X, adding, “You must get permission to create a new, commercial product based on someone else’s IP — just like Spotify did, and Napster didn’t.” And Kieran Snyder, co-founder and CEO of Seattle augmented writing startup Textio, called the suit “the future of IP rights” in a post on LinkedIn.
The New York Times is among an increasing number of news outlets that have blocked OpenAI’s web crawler. The BBC, CNN and Reuters made similar moves, The Verge reported in October.
Comedian and author Sarah Silverman has also joined a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement.
Creators of all types, from writers to musicians to artists and photographers, are grappling with how generative AI technology could impact their fields and the protection of their works.
Meanwhile, some outlets have struck deals with OpenAI to allow for the use of their materials. Global news publisher Axel Springer struck a deal to allow the use of content from Business Insider, Politico and other outlets earlier this month. OpenAI previously reached a deal to license stories from the archive of The Associated Press.
OpenAI started as a nonprofit but later created a for-profit subsidiary buoyed by the release of ChatGPT last year and the partnership with Microsoft. Microsoft invested an initial $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, and added at least $10 billion more in January.
The relationship weathered a bizarre turn of events in November, when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was ousted and then reinstated as the company’s leader.
“We look forward to building on our strong partnership and delivering the value of this next generation of AI to our customers and partners,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at the time.
