The New York Times amended its lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft on Thursday, modifying one claim against Microsoft and dropping another against OpenAI, according to a legal filing in federal court.
The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, accusing the tech companies of infringing on its copyrights by using millions of its articles to train A.I. technologies, including the ChatGPT chatbot. Artificial intelligence technologies now compete with The Times as a source of information, the news outlet argued in its suit.
The Times claimed in its suit that OpenAI and Microsoft infringed on its copyrights. The media company also accused Microsoft of “contributory” infringement, in part because it provided the computing power that OpenAI used to build its A.I. technologies.
In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday, The Times accused Microsoft of encouraging OpenAI to train its A.I. systems using copyrighted articles from The Times and of providing services designed to help with this training.
The Times also dropped a claim from its original lawsuit, filed in 2023, accusing OpenAI of “secondarily” infringing on its copyrights because it did not prevent consumers and businesses from generating copyrighted material using A.I.
“As we have long alleged, Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal our copyrighted works,” Graham James, a Times spokesman, said in a statement. “Beyond amending that claim and streamlining the case to its most potent arguments, our core claims remain the same from the day we filed this lawsuit.”
An OpenAI spokesman, Drew Pusateri, said in a statement on Thursday, “Our models empower innovation, are trained on publicly available data and are grounded in fair use.”
A spokesman for Microsoft, Frank X. Shaw, added: “These allegations have been thoroughly explored over the course of a yearlong discovery process and are not substantiated. This is a last-ditch effort by the plaintiff to save its claim from unfavorable precedent set in other recent rulings.”
OpenAI and Microsoft previously denied wrongdoing, saying they respect the rights of content creators. OpenAI has also argued in a court filing that ChatGPT is not a substitute for a Times subscription.
The Times was the first major American media company to sue OpenAI over copyright issues related to its written works. Novelists, computer programmers and other groups have also filed copyright suits against OpenAI and other companies that build A.I. technologies. There are now more than 40 cases around the country.
In a settlement in September, Anthropic, one of OpenAI’s primary rivals, agreed to pay $1.5 billion to a group of authors and publishers after a judge ruled it had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books.
In December, The Times filed another lawsuit, claiming that its copyrights were repeatedly violated by Perplexity, an A.I. start-up that has built an internet search engine.
Like other A.I. companies, OpenAI built its technologies by feeding them enormous amounts of digital data, some of which is copyrighted. A.I. companies have long claimed that they can legally use copyrighted material to train their systems without paying for it because they transformed the material for a different use.
In accusing OpenAI of infringing on its copyrights on Thursday, The Times cited several examples of an OpenAI chatbot providing users with near-verbatim excerpts from its articles that would otherwise require a paid subscription.
