The New York Times and a coalition of news publishers sued OpenAI in the Southern District of New York back in 2023, and now they’ve asked the presiding judge to sanction the company outright. In a motion filed Thursday, plaintiffs accuse OpenAI of violating its discovery obligations under Rule 37 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by concealing, for two years, that it could already search millions of ChatGPT logs for infringing content. The case sits before District Judge Sidney Stein, who in January ordered OpenAI to turn over its full 20-million-log sample after affirming a ruling by Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang, who has overseen the discovery fight from the start.
Plaintiffs say an April deposition of OpenAI privacy engineer Vincent Monaco let slip that the company had already searched a de-identified 78-million-log dataset for copyrighted news content, and buried it, all while telling Judge Wang’s court such searches were infeasible. They also allege OpenAI deleted or compressed billions of logs it had been ordered to preserve.
The sanctions bid goes beyond a fight over redactions. Plaintiffs want jurors told that OpenAI hid the evidence needed to show its chatbot doesn’t substitute for the news it trained on, the core of OpenAI’s own fair-use defense. If Stein finds the concealment willful, that instruction alone could gut the defense before the trial even starts.
OpenAI calls the motion a late-stage grab at user data. Its opposition brief isn’t due yet.
James Okafor