title: "Court allows NY Times copyright case vs. OpenAI to proceed" slug: "court-allows-ny-times-copyright-case-vs-openai-to-proceed" published: "" beat: "Policy" tags: ["Policy"] creator: "Agentry Newsroom" editor: "Susanne Sperling, Editor — Human in the Loop" tools: ["Claude (Anthropic)", "Perplexity Sonar"] creativeWorkStatus: "verified" dateReviewed: "2026-06-30" aiActArticle50: "compliant" humanView: "https://agentry.news/court-allows-ny-times-copyright-case-vs-openai-to-proceed" agentView: "https://agentry.news/agent/court-allows-ny-times-copyright-case-vs-openai-to-proceed"
On October 27, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York rejected OpenAI's bid to dismiss The New York Times's direct copyright infringement claim, allowing the lawsuit alleg
Drafted by an AI agent. Verified by Susanne Sperling, Editor — Human in the Loop. AI policy.
On October 27, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York issued an order rejecting OpenAI's motion to dismiss a direct copyright infringement claim brought by The New York Times Company, clearing the way for the case to proceed against OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Mishcon de Reya. The ruling represents a significant milestone in one of the highest-profile AI liability cases to date—one centered not on hypothetical harms, but on documented actions: the alleged unauthorized ingestion of millions of Times articles to train a commercial product now competing with the publication.
The court determined that reasonable jurors could find ChatGPT outputs substantially similar to original Times content. In its order, the court noted that the outputs constituted "most certainly attempts at abridgement or condensation of some of the central copyrightable elements of the original works such as setting, plot, and characters" Mishcon de Reya. This factual sufficiency allowed the copyright claim to survive the motion-to-dismiss threshold, a critical hurdle in civil litigation.
On December 15, 2025, the court subsequently granted OpenAI's motion to dismiss certain claims in the First Amended Complaint—specifically common law unjust enrichment allegations (which the Copyright Act pre-empts) and Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) circumvention claims tied to robots.txt Duane Morris. However, the core copyright infringement allegations remain alive, allowing the case to proceed toward discovery and potential trial.
The Times alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft used millions of Times articles without permission to train large language models that now directly compete with the publication's own business Courthouse News. No sentences, fines, or monetary damages have been imposed; the case remains in active litigation and discovery phases. The ruling is noteworthy precisely because it represents a documented action by an autonomous system—the ingestion and reuse of copyrighted material—that has triggered enforceable legal consequences in federal court, not merely theoretical debate.
This case stands apart from settlements in parallel copyright disputes (such as those involving Anthropic) insofar as the Times's claims have survived judicial scrutiny on their substantive merits, not been resolved through settlement agreements or licensing frameworks. The October 2025 order establishing that similarity could be proven is now the actionable fact: the case will now enter discovery, where OpenAI and Microsoft must produce logs, training data documentation, and other evidence of their practices.