Newspapers Seek Sanctions Over OpenAI’s Alleged Evidence Hiding in Copyright Fight

A coalition of newspapers—including The New York Times, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune parent MediaNews Group, Ziff Davis, and the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting—filed a motion in a Manhattan federal court on July 9, 2026 asking the judge to impose sanctions on OpenAI. The plaintiffs allege that OpenAI deliberately misled the court about its ability to search its large-language-model datasets for copyrighted material and subsequently deleted or rendered unsearchable billions of ChatGPT conversation logs that could prove misuse of millions of news articles. The filing seeks attorney fees and a finding that OpenAI’s chat logs demonstrate unlawful training on the plaintiffs’ content.

Reuters

The dispute stems from a lawsuit first filed by The New York Times in 2023, which accuses OpenAI and its primary backer Microsoft of training ChatGPT on the newspapers’ articles without permission. The case joins a wave of copyright actions by authors, visual artists, and record labels against AI firms. In 2024, Google introduced AI-generated search summaries that further threatened news-site traffic, prompting many outlets to negotiate licensing deals with AI companies. The Associated Press signed the first such agreement with OpenAI in 2023. A related development highlighted in the filing is Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with book authors for training its Claude model on pirated works, underscoring the broader industry pressure on AI developers.

The Independent

Ian Crosby, lead attorney for The New York Times, said the company “has been lied to for over two years” and that OpenAI “claimed searching ChatGPT outputs … was infeasible, burdensome, and invasive of users’ privacy while concealing that it had already done such searches.” Steven Lieberman, attorney for the Daily News, asserted that OpenAI “has been making misrepresentations for two years about its ability to search for copyrighted content.” OpenAI declined to comment when approached for a response.

Reuters

• “This motion asks the court to punish OpenAI for hiding and destroying evidence showing how ChatGPT was trained on stolen journalism,” — Steven Lieberman, attorney, Daily News

The Independent

• “For over two years, OpenAI lied to The Times, The Daily News Plaintiffs, the public, and the court,” — Ian Crosby, lead attorney, The New York Times

Reuters

• “It claimed searching ChatGPT outputs for copies of The Times’ and the Daily News Plaintiffs’ content was infeasible, burdensome, and invasive of users' privacy – while at the same time concealing that it had already done such searches.” — Ian Crosby, lead attorney, The New York Times

Reuters