Seems reasonable - they probably broke the TOS of the site
robots.txt on nytimes.com now disallows indexing by GPTBot, so there's an argument against automated information acquisition starting from some moment, but before some moment they weren't explicitly against that.
I do think that’s the case for some things but especially for new things that doesn’t seem like a common sense understanding of the world.
If you don't want people to get at your land, setting up even a small fence creates an explicit indication of limitations. Just like the record in robots.txt I mentioned earlier.
New York Times also doesn't limit article text content if you just request HTML, which is typical for automated cases. But they impose th limits imposed on users viewing the pages in browser with Javascript, CSS and everything else. So they clearly:
1. Have a way to determine the user's eligibility for reading the full article on server side.
2. Don't limit the content for typical automated cases on server side.
3. Have a way to track the activity of not logged in users, determining the eligibility for access. So it's reasonable to assume that they had records of repeated access from the same origin, but didn't impose any limitations before some time.
So there are enough reasons to think that robots are welcome to read the articles fully. I'm not talking about copyright violations here, only about the ability to receive the data.