The New York Times is suing OpenAI over copyright breaches, here's what you need to know

The New York Times has filed a civil lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in Federal District Court in Manhattan Wednesday, claiming that the technology companies used the newspaper's content to train its artificial intelligence, breaching copyright protections.

The Times does not ask for a specific dollar amount but says that the lawsuit, "seeks to hold them (the defendants) responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe for the unlawful copying and use of The Times’s uniquely valuable works."

Neither company has responded to the lawsuit publicly. USA Today has reached out to both Microsoft and OpenAI and will update this story if we receive a response.

The lawsuit comes at a pivotal moment for artificial intelligence as the technology has proliferated in recent years.

"The future of generative AI models requires vast amounts of training data, determining what data is protected and what data may fall under fair use is 'the' question," Shelly Palmer, CEO at The Palmer Group, a tech strategy advisory group, said in his "Think About This" newsletter Wednesday.

What is OpenAI?

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence company that was founded in 2015 and has recently faced a power struggle within the company centered around co-founder and CEO Sam Altman.

The company is best known for its generative artificial intelligence chat-bot, ChatGPT, that was launched in November of 2022.

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Others who have sued over copyright infringement

Comedian Sarah Siverman and two others sued OpenAI and Meta, Facebook's parent company, claiming that, "their copyrighted materials were ingested and used to train ChatGPT."

A collection of authors, including Jonathan Franzen and George R.R. Martin, also sued OpenAI this year alleging that the company ingested their work to train its artificial intelligence.

Getty Images sued Stability AI in February claiming that the company committed, "brazen infringement of Getty Images’ intellectual property on a staggering scale," to train its technology.

AI and other media outlets

Earlier this year The Associated Press signed an agreement with OpenAI to license news stories.

Axel Springer, the company that owns POLITICO and Business Insider, signed a similar agreement with OpenAI that allows ChatGPT to provide summaries of articles from the company's properties.

Read the lawsuit