Story perspectives

New York Times sues Microsoft, OpenAI over training data

By Drooid · Sep 18, 2026, 2:38 PM UTC · How we work

Summary

Story summary

The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI in a U.S. District Court in New York.
Microsoft’s Brent Hecht called AI data scraping “the largest theft of labor in human history”.
OpenAI head of ChatGPT Nick Turley labeled generative AI an “existential threat” to publishers in internal communications.
Court filings show OpenAI’s training data included 91,692 New York Times articles and over 2 million nytimes.com documents from Common Crawl.

History

Historical Context

Beginning in 2005, the Authors Guild and publishers sued Google over its Book Search project, which had scanned millions of works, including about five million copyrighted titles. The Second Circuit’s 2015 decision declared the scanning and snippet display fair use, citing Google’s $125 million settlement payout. That precedent now frames the New York Times’ 2024 lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI for using its articles to train AI.

1 of 2

Story summary

The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI in a U.S. District Court in New York.
Microsoft’s Brent Hecht called AI data scraping “the largest theft of labor in human history”.
OpenAI head of ChatGPT Nick Turley labeled generative AI an “existential threat” to publishers in internal communications.
Court filings show OpenAI’s training data included 91,692 New York Times articles and over 2 million nytimes.com documents from Common Crawl.

1 / 2