NYT vs. OpenAI Lawsuit Update: Ruling, ChatGPT Logs, Fair Use

The New York Times’s copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft is deep into pretrial proceedings, with summary judgment briefing completed on April 2, 2026 and a ruling projected for the third quarter of the year. If any of the Times’s claims survive that ruling, trial is expected in 2027. This is the latest NYT vs. OpenAI lawsuit update: most of the Times’s core copyright theories have already cleared a motion to dismiss, OpenAI has been ordered to turn over 20 million ChatGPT logs, and the case now anchors a multidistrict litigation covering roughly a dozen suits against the company.¹

Where the Case Stands Right Now

The case is in the Southern District of New York before Judge Sidney H. Stein, with Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang handling day-to-day discovery.² A summary judgment hearing was expected in May 2026. No trial date has been set.¹

In April 2025, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation folded roughly a dozen copyright suits against OpenAI into a single MDL (No. 25-MD-3143), housed before the same judges already handling the Times’s case.³ Consolidated plaintiffs include the Authors Guild, the Daily News, and individual writers such as Sarah Silverman and Paul Tremblay. Seventeen U.S. publications have now joined the consolidated OpenAI litigation.⁴ The consolidation means Judge Stein will shape the pretrial record on fair use for all of them.

What the Times Is Suing Over

The Times filed its original complaint on December 27, 2023, naming Microsoft and eight OpenAI entities as defendants.⁵ The allegation is that OpenAI scraped millions of Times articles to train its large language models, and that those models can now reproduce or closely paraphrase Times content in response to user prompts, competing directly with the newspaper. The complaint seeks billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages and asks the court to order the destruction of any AI models and training data that incorporate the Times’s work.⁶

The claims fall into several categories: direct copyright infringement for copying articles into training datasets; contributory and vicarious infringement for building tools that let users generate infringing outputs; and DMCA violations under 17 U.S.C. § 1202 for stripping copyright management information from works during training. The Daily News plaintiffs also asserted trademark dilution claims. A “hot news” misappropriation claim was dismissed with prejudice in April 2025.⁷

The Times filed a first amended complaint in August 2024 and a second amended complaint on May 28, 2025, the latter aimed at strengthening its DMCA claims regarding intentional removal of copyright management information.⁸

The Ruling That Let the Case Survive

Judge Stein’s April 4, 2025 opinion on the motion to dismiss went largely against OpenAI and Microsoft. The court denied OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the contributory copyright infringement claims, finding that the Times plausibly alleged that ChatGPT users engage in direct infringement when the tool reproduces copyrighted articles, and that OpenAI had reason to know this was happening. Judge Stein applied the Second Circuit’s “know or have reason to know” standard, rejecting OpenAI’s push for a higher bar of actual knowledge of specific infringing acts.⁹

The court also rejected OpenAI’s statute-of-limitations defense against direct infringement claims based on training conducted in 2019 and 2020. OpenAI argued those claims were filed too late, but the judge found that OpenAI failed to show the Times had discovered or should have discovered the infringement more than three years before filing. Past press coverage about AI training, including a 2020 Times article, did not amount to sufficient “storm warnings” to start the clock.⁹

Some claims did fall away. “Abridgment” claims brought by the Center for Investigative Reporting were thrown out with prejudice because the court found that ChatGPT’s abridged outputs were not substantially similar to the original works as a matter of law. DMCA claims under § 1202(b)(1) were dismissed against Microsoft in all three consolidated actions, and § 1202(b)(3) claims were dismissed against all defendants, though without prejudice. The Daily News’s state and federal trademark dilution claims survived intact.⁷

The Fight Over ChatGPT Logs

The most heated discovery fight has been over ChatGPT user conversations. The Times wants to see what ChatGPT actually produces in real conversations to prove the tool routinely generates content that reproduces copyrighted articles.

In November 2025, Magistrate Judge Wang ordered OpenAI to produce a random sample of 20 million de-identified consumer ChatGPT logs spanning December 2022 to November 2024. OpenAI objected on multiple grounds: the logs contain complete multi-turn conversations rather than isolated prompt-output pairs; more than 99.99% would be irrelevant to the lawsuit by the company’s own estimate; and the company warned the order set a “dangerous precedent,” comparing it to demanding the private emails of millions of Gmail users.¹⁰

On January 5, 2026, Judge Stein affirmed the order, ruling that the magistrate judge had appropriately balanced privacy against relevance. He rejected OpenAI’s argument that courts must order the “least burdensome discovery possible,” writing that “no case law requires” that standard. He also noted that ChatGPT users voluntarily submitted their communications and that the legal ownership of the logs was “uncontested.”¹¹ Even logs not containing reproductions of the Times’s works, the court observed, were “relevant to OpenAI’s fair use defense.”¹

Preservation and Deletion

Before the log production dispute, the parties fought over whether OpenAI could continue deleting user conversations. In May 2025, Magistrate Judge Wang issued a preservation order requiring OpenAI to “preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis.” Judge Stein affirmed the order in June 2025.¹² It covered ChatGPT Free, Plus, Pro, and Team plans, as well as API usage without a Zero Data Retention agreement, but excluded Enterprise and Edu customers.

OpenAI said the obligation forced it to retain roughly 60 billion conversations, required “months of engineering work” and “millions in hosting infrastructure,” and compelled the company to disregard “legal, contractual, regulatory, and ethical commitments to hundreds of millions of people.”¹² CEO Sam Altman publicly floated the idea of an “AI Privilege” to shield user conversations from discovery, though no such privilege exists in U.S. law. The indefinite retention obligation ended on September 26, 2025, and OpenAI returned to its standard practice of deleting conversations within 30 days. It continues to store a limited set of historical data from April through September 2025, accessible only to a small audited legal team.

The Deposition Dispute

On April 8, 2026, Magistrate Judge Wang granted additional deposition time to the plaintiffs after finding that OpenAI’s corporate representative was unprepared to testify on noticed topics during a Rule 30(b)(6) deposition. The court ordered OpenAI to re-designate and produce a properly prepared witness. No financial sanctions were imposed.¹

The Fair Use Question the Case Turns On

The central question the case will ultimately resolve is whether training AI models on copyrighted news articles qualifies as fair use. OpenAI argues the training process is “highly transformative” because models learn mathematical patterns and logic from text rather than storing and regurgitating it. The company points to the Google Books case, where scanning books for a searchable index was found to be transformative fair use, and to recent rulings in other AI cases.¹³

The Times counters that OpenAI’s use is not transformative because ChatGPT creates products that compete directly with the newspaper as a source of information. Where Google Books displayed snippets and directed users to buy the book, ChatGPT can provide substantive answers that eliminate the need to visit the Times’s website, undermining subscriptions, licensing revenue, and advertising.⁶

OpenAI characterizes instances of ChatGPT reproducing large portions of articles as a “bug” caused by users deliberately crafting prompts to force the model to recite memorized text, and says its tools include “built-in guardrails” against copying.¹³ The Times alleges that the very ability to extract copyrighted text shows the models have memorized the works, and that guardrails don’t erase infringement already baked into training.

No court has ruled on fair use in this specific case. The April 2025 opinion addressed only the motion to dismiss and explicitly noted that the choice between competing factual inferences about training and output “is not a decision to be made at the motion to dismiss stage.”⁹ The issue is expected to be addressed at summary judgment.

How Other AI Rulings Are Cutting Both Ways

Courts around the country are reaching different conclusions on AI training and fair use. In Bartz v. Anthropic, a Northern District of California judge ruled that training on legally acquired books is “quintessentially transformative” fair use, while training on pirated copies from shadow libraries is not.¹⁴ That case produced a $1.5 billion class action settlement in September 2025, covering roughly 500,000 books at about $3,000 each, addressing only Anthropic’s acquisition of pirated copies and releasing no claims related to AI outputs or future training.¹⁵

In Kadrey v. Meta, another California court granted Meta summary judgment on fair use grounds but introduced a “market dilution” theory suggesting AI-generated content could function as an indirect market substitute by flooding the market with competing works. The defense succeeded only because the plaintiffs failed to present evidence supporting that theory. In Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, the court rejected a fair use defense entirely, finding that an AI legal search tool trained on copyrighted headnotes was a direct market substitute, not a transformative new product.¹⁴

Judge Stein’s rulings have already diverged from his California counterparts on motions to dismiss. Legal observers view the MDL consolidation as concentrating risk for OpenAI because one judge will now shape the pretrial record across all the cases against it.³

Licensing Deals and Why They Matter Legally

OpenAI has signed multi-year licensing deals with dozens of publishers, including News Corp (valued at over $250 million over five years), Axel Springer, the Associated Press, Condé Nast, The Atlantic, and the Financial Times.¹⁶ The Times, according to reporting, was unsatisfied with licensing offers from OpenAI and chose to litigate instead.

These deals matter legally because they bear on the fourth factor of the fair use test, which asks about the effect of the use on the market for the copyrighted work. A functioning licensing market suggests real commercial value is being extracted from copyrighted content, which cuts against a fair use finding.

The Times’s Parallel Suit Against Perplexity

The OpenAI case is not the Times’s only front. On December 5, 2025, the newspaper filed a separate copyright suit against Perplexity AI in the same court, alleging that the AI-powered search engine scrapes “large chunks” of its content, including entire articles, to generate answers that compete directly with the original reporting.¹⁷ The Times said it had contacted Perplexity multiple times over the previous 18 months demanding it stop using Times content without a deal. That case is in its early stages, with briefing on Perplexity’s expected motion to dismiss scheduled through April 2026.¹⁸ It is a separate action and any ruling there will not directly decide the OpenAI case, but it signals the Times’s willingness to press its copyright theory across the AI industry.

Whether the Times’s argument prevails will depend, in large part, on what Judge Stein decides when the fair use question reaches him later this year.

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