In a legal dispute that has garnered significant attention, The New York Times has initiated a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging unauthorized utilization of millions of news articles to train the advanced language model, ChatGPT. As a key aspect of this litigation, The New York Times has petitioned the court to mandate OpenAI to indefinitely preserve all user-generated content within ChatGPT, aiming to uncover evidence that supports its claims within this vast dataset. To date, OpenAI and Microsoft have yet to officially respond to this request.

The New York Times has emphasized that these AI models pose direct competition to news organizations, resulting in substantial financial losses estimated in billions of dollars. Consequently, the publication has demanded the destruction of both the models and the training data that incorporate their copyrighted material. Prior to filing the lawsuit, The New York Times had engaged in negotiations with both companies over copyright concerns, yet these efforts failed to yield a mutually acceptable agreement.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has made it clear that he intends to challenge The New York Times' request to retain all user conversation data. Altman asserts that complying with such a demand would constitute a significant breach of OpenAI's commitment to protecting user privacy.