OpenAI is contesting a federal court order requiring it to preserve all user data, including deleted chats, as part of a copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times.

“We strongly believe this is an overreach by The New York Times. We’re continuing to appeal this order so we can keep putting your trust and privacy first,” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said in a statement.

The decision stems from a May 13 order to “preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis until further order of the Court.”

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, alleging that both companies illegally used Times content to train large language models like ChatGPT and Bing Chat. 

The Times claims this infringes on its copyrights and threatens the business model of original journalism. It said last month that potential evidence of copyright infringement might be deleted as users clear their chat histories.

At the heart of the case is whether using copyrighted material to train generative AI models constitutes “fair use.” The Times alleges that OpenAI’s tools sometimes generate near-verbatim outputs from its articles and can bypass its paywall through AI-generated summaries.

Both sides have argued they are taking the moral high ground. The Times has said it is protecting journalism and the ability of the media to do its work and get paid for it. 

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has accused the outlet of being “on the wrong side of history”, while the company has said The Times cherry-picked the data used in the suit.

As the generative AI industry expands, courts are becoming key battlegrounds in the fight over data, privacy, and intellectual property. 

The lawsuit is one of several high-profile copyright claims brought against OpenAI and other AI firms. In April, Ziff Davis, which owns media outlets such as PCMag and Mashable, sued OpenAI over allegations of using its content without consent.

This week, Reddit filed a suit against another AI company, Anthropic, alleging it scraped Reddit data without permission. Anthropic is also facing lawsuits from music publishers and authors.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair