OpenAI Seeks to Dismiss Parts of The New York Times’s Lawsuit

OpenAI filed a motion in federal court on Monday that seeks to dismiss some key elements of a lawsuit brought by The New York Times Company.

The Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft on Dec. 27, accusing them of infringing on its copyrights by using millions of its articles to train A.I. technologies like the online chatbot ChatGPT. Chatbots now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information, the lawsuit said.

In the motion filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the defendants argue that ChatGPT “is not in any way a substitute for a subscription to The New York Times.”

“In the real world, people do not use ChatGPT or any other OpenAI product for that purpose,” the filing said. “Nor could they. In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will.”

Representatives for OpenAI and the Times Company did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The motion asked the court to dismiss four claims from The Times’s complaint to narrow the focus of the lawsuit. OpenAI’s lawyers argued that The Times should not be allowed to sue for acts of reproduction that occurred more than three years ago and that the paper’s claim that OpenAI violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, an amendment to U.S. copyright law passed in 1998 after the rise of the internet, was not legally sound.