The New York Times, the Daily News, and other media outlets are demanding a federal judge penalize OpenAI for allegedly hiding evidence crucial to a landmark copyright infringement trial. This legal battle exposes the deep contradictions inherent in the current economic order, where new technologies built on the collective output of human labor seek to displace that very labor without compensation.
Newspapers accuse OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and its business partner, Microsoft, of obscuring how their AI systems were trained using millions of copyrighted news articles. A filing in a Manhattan federal courthouse on Thursday alleges OpenAI "chose obstruction" over releasing datasets and ChatGPT logs. These logs could reveal the extent to which the AI system appropriated copyrighted news content.
Steven Lieberman, attorney for the New York Daily News, stated that OpenAI has been "making misrepresentations" for two years regarding its ability to search for copyrighted content within its AI training datasets and logs. "This motion asks the court to punish OpenAI for hiding and destroying evidence showing how ChatGPT was trained on stolen journalism," Lieberman asserted, representing the Daily News and seven sister papers.
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri countered, claiming the company's limitations in sharing ChatGPT logs are to protect user privacy. Pusateri dismissed the allegations as "blatantly false," stating, "We'll continue defending our users' privacy and the long-established principles of fair use."
The Appropriation of Labor
The New York Times initiated its lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, about three years ago, following ChatGPT's debut and the subsequent commercial AI boom. This boom fundamentally altered how people access information online. The threat to news publications intensified about two years ago, in 2024, when Google introduced AI-generated summaries at the top of online search results. This move directly cut off the advertising dollars that flow when users click through to original news sources, effectively siphoning off the value created by journalistic labor.
News organizations like MediaNews Group-owned papers, the Chicago Tribune, digital media publisher Ziff Davis, and the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting have since joined The Times in its legal action. They argue that AI chatbots unfairly compete as information sources, extracting web traffic without performing the essential journalistic work of gathering news.
OpenAI and other tech companies invoke the "fair use" doctrine of U.S. copyright law, claiming it protects their process of training AI systems on digitized books and online articles. This legal theory is currently being tested in dozens of lawsuits brought by visual artists, novelists, and music record labels against AI companies.
Capital's Gains, Labor's Losses
While the legal battles unfold, the financial stakes for capital are immense. OpenAI rival Anthropic, for instance, agreed to pay book authors $1.5 billion for using their pirated works to train its chatbot, Claude. This sum, however, represents only a small fraction of Anthropic's staggering $965 billion market valuation as it prepares for public trading. Such figures underscore the vast wealth being accumulated by tech giants through the appropriation of creative and journalistic output.
The New York Times' arguments specifically target the "unfair competition" of companies that "seek to free-ride on The Times's massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment." The Times has already spent over $28 million fighting AI companies in court, including another lawsuit against AI company Perplexity. The newspapers now seek attorney fees to cover their efforts to secure "improperly withheld" evidence.
The State's Role in Managing Contradictions
The mounting litigation costs for media outlets contrast sharply with the trend of other organizations signing licensing deals with AI companies. The Associated Press, about three years ago in 2023, was the first to announce such a deal with OpenAI. Google and Facebook parent Meta have also entered into agreements, typically paying a fee to outlets to train AI systems on their news feeds or archives. These market-based solutions, facilitated by the state's legal framework, attempt to manage the contradictions of capital accumulation without challenging the fundamental mechanism of value extraction.
The federal judge's role in this dispute is to arbitrate between competing factions of capital, determining the terms under which the value created by journalistic labor can be appropriated and monetized. The legal system, in this instance, functions to define the boundaries of intellectual property and ensure a semblance of order in the ongoing struggle over who profits from collective human endeavor. It does not, however, address the underlying structural issues that allow tech giants to amass immense wealth by leveraging the work of others. The current legal framework, including the "fair use" doctrine, serves as a mechanism to regulate, rather than dismantle, the systematic underpayment and appropriation of labor's output. The struggle continues within the confines of a system designed to protect accumulated wealth. The outcome will shape not just the future of news, but the very definition of value in an increasingly automated economy. The question remains: will the workers who produce the content ever truly benefit from the wealth it generates? The current legal skirmishes suggest not. They merely reallocate profits among different capitalist entities. The core issue of labor's exploitation remains unaddressed by these reform efforts.