New York Times seeks sanctions against OpenAI over discovery abuse

Publishers Escalate Copyright Case with Sanctions Motion

The New York Times, New York Daily News, and other U.S. publishers asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to sanction OpenAI on July 9, 2026, alleging the company deliberately misrepresented its ability to search for copyrighted material in its systems during discovery proceedings.

The motion claims that OpenAI told the court it could not search its large language models or ChatGPT logs for copyrighted news articles—a statement the publishers say was false. According to Reuters, the plaintiffs alleged that OpenAI had hidden the fact that it performed searches for their copyrighted content "even before the first News Plaintiff filed suit." An OpenAI employee later testified under oath that the company "performed multiple searches for News Plaintiffs' content," Reuters reported.

Deleted Data and Obstruction Allegations

The publishers also contend that OpenAI deleted billions of relevant ChatGPT conversations or made them unsearchable, effectively destroying evidence. Bloomberg Law reported that the plaintiffs accused OpenAI of a "deliberate and systemic effort to obstruct discovery" in the case.

The sanctions motion seeks attorneys' fees and a judicial finding that OpenAI's chat logs demonstrate misuse of copyrighted works. No specific dollar amount for requested sanctions was disclosed in initial court filings.

Broader Copyright Dispute Over Training Data

The sanctions motion is part of a larger copyright dispute that began when the Times filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, alleging the companies used millions of news articles without permission to train AI models. An amended complaint was filed in June 2026, narrowing the scope but intensifying allegations against both defendants.

The case represents one of the largest legal challenges to AI companies' training practices and reflects escalating tensions between media publishers and generative AI firms over intellectual property rights. Microsoft, OpenAI's major commercial partner, remains a co-defendant in the underlying litigation.