OpenAI says The NYT "hacked" ChatGPT, launching a lawsuit
OpenAI's February 2024 court filing turned The New York Times copyright case into a fight over evidence construction, not only training data. The Times had sued Microsoft and OpenAI in December 2023, alleging that generative AI systems used Times journalism without permission and could reproduce or substitute for parts of its work. OpenAI's partial motion to dismiss answered with a narrower but volatile claim: the Times' examples did not show ordinary product use, because they allegedly required repeated attempts, article excerpts, a bug and prompts OpenAI said violated its terms. The legal signal is the pressure this dispute puts on three control surfaces at once: publisher licensing leverage, AI training defenses and the evidentiary methods used to prove model-output copying.