OpenAI, New York Times case tees up key test of AI training under copyright law

The Times' lawsuit, first filed in 2023, accuses OpenAI and its largest financial backer Microsoft of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train ChatGPT. A group of authors, including John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen and George R.R. Martin, separately sued the companies the same year for using their books to train OpenAI's popular chatbot.

Those cases and other related lawsuits were consolidated in New York last year. Dozens of other complaints have also been brought by copyright owners against tech companies over what they call the theft of their material to train AI systems.

The pending cases will likely turn on whether AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by using it to create transformative new content. The first two judges to consider the issue issued diverging rulings last year.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco called Anthropic's use of books for AI training “quintessentially transformative.”