The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorised use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies.

The Times is the first major American media organisation to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular AI platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works. The lawsuit, filed in US District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by the Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.

The suit does not include an exact monetary demand. But it says the defendants should be held responsible for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” related to the “unlawful copying and use of the Times’ uniquely valuable works”. It also calls for the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from the Times.

Representatives of OpenAI and Microsoft could not be immediately reached for comment.

The lawsuit could test the emerging legal contours of generative AI technologies — so-called for the text, images and other content they can create after learning from large data sets — and could carry major implications for the news industry. The Times is among a small number of outlets that have built successful business models from online journalism, but dozens of newspapers and magazines have been hobbled by readers’ migration to the Internet.

“Defendants seek to free-ride on the Times’ massive investment in its journalism,” the complaint says, accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of “using the Times’ content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it.”

The lawsuit filed on Wednesday apparently follows an impasse in negotiations involving the Times, Microsoft and OpenAI.

In its complaint, the Times said that it approached Microsoft and OpenAI in April to raise concerns about the use of its intellectual property and explore “an amicable resolution” — possibly involving a commercial agreement and “technological guardrails” around generative AI products — but that the talks reached no resolution.

New York Times News Service