The New York Times has officially sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, the first major media company to seek a legal fight over generative AI. The complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that the two tech companies used Times journalism — without permission — as a key source of information for training AI systems like ChatGPT and Bing, essentially robbing the Times of potential revenue and web traffic. (Disclosure: Members of The Media Copilot team do consulting work for several companies, including Microsoft.) We have been heading toward something like this for a while. Although OpenAI has begun making deals with media companies to use their content for ChatGPT — see with Axel Springer a couple of weeks ago — there’s been a looming standoff between media and Big Tech over the development of generative AI platforms: how large language models (LLMs) are trained, and how they provide answers to users. Put simply, general-purpose GenAI tools like ChatGPT and Bing Chat seek to give users a “no click” experience, returning clear answers directly in response to queries. Users don’t need to click through to a source to get the information, so there’s no traffic for a media company to monetize. Absent a deal with the company that designed the tool, the site that produced the information — in this case the Times — gets nothing. Although OpenAI and Microsoft have yet to respond to the lawsuit, generally the argument on the other side comes down to fair use. Media sites like the Times publish their information on the open web, which is accessible by anyone, including AI companies. Even if the content is behind a paywall, it still needs to be discoverable by web crawlers so it can appear on search engines, which have traditionally been a big source of traffic for media sites. Using that content to train AI systems, it is claimed, is simply an extension of that idea. |
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June 11, 2026
