Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy
openai.com
openai.com
As might any plaintiff. NYT might be the first of many others and the lawsuits may not be limited to copyright claims
Why has OpenAI collected and stored 20 million conversations (including "deleted chats")
What is the purpose of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations
By contrast the purpose of NYT's request is both clear and limited
The documents requested are not being made public by the plaintiffs. The documents will presumably be redacted to protect any confidential information before being produced to the plaintiffs, the documents can only be used by the plaintiffs for the purpose of the litigation against OpenAI and, unlike OpenAI who has collected and stored these conversations for as long as OpenAI desires, the plaintiffs are prohibited from retaining copies of the documents after the litigation is concluded
The privacy issue here has been created by OpenAI for their own commercial benefit
It is not even clear what this benefit, if any, will be as OpenAI continues to search for a "business model"
Wanton data collection
https://ia801404.us.archive.org/31/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.6...
https://ia801404.us.archive.org/31/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.6...
It was doing this prior to being sued by the NYT and many others
OpenAI was collecting chats even when the user asked for deletion, i.e., the user did not want them saved
That's why a lawsuit could require OpenAi to issue a hold order, retain these chats for longer and produce them to another party in discovery
If OpenAI was not collecting these chats in the ordinary course of its business before being sued by the NYT and many others, then there would be no "deleted chats" for OpenAI to be compelled by court order to retain and produce to the plaintiffs
1. Or whatever period OpenAI decides on. It could change at any time for any reason. However OpenAI cannot change their retention policy to some shortened period after being sued. Google tried this a few years ago. It began destroying chats between employees after Google was on notice it was going to be sued by the US government and state AGs
This is an intelligence service's wet dream.
Im an age of automated backups and failovers, deleting can be really hard. Part of the answer could simply be that syncing a delete across all the redundancies (while ensuring those redundancies are reliable when a disaster happens and they need to recover or maintain uptime) may take days to weeks. Also the 30 days could be the limit, as oppose to the average or median time it takes.
When working on an e-commerce gig we would get "delete my data" requests from customers, which we're legally obliged to comply with. A script would delete everything we could from the DB immediately. Since we had 30 day backups, their data would only be deleted from the backups on day 31. I think this was acceptable to the GDPR consultant.
Going in to the backups to delete their data there in insane.
Nevertheless, you're generally correct but you don't realize why: A core feature of ChatGPT is that it keeps your conversation history right there so you can click on it, review it, and continue conversations across all of your devices. The court order is to preserve what is already present in the system even if the user asks to delete it.
For those who are confused: A core feature of ChatGPT and other LLM accounts is that your past conversations are available to return to, until you specifically delete them. The problem now is that if a user asks for the conversation to be deleted, OpenAI has to retain the conversation for the court order even though it appears deleted.
Is it a requirement that ChatGPT users own multiple computers
Is it a requirement that ChatGPT users use ChatGPT on multiple computers
Is it true that a goal of online advertising services providers is to learn about all of an ad targets' computers and link them to a single identity
Is every software "feature" necessary
Are there "features" in some software that benefit software developers more than software users, e.g., through data colllection, surveilllance and advertising services
Should all software "features" chosen by developers be "opt-out", with default settings chosen by developers not users, or should some be "opt-in"
What if a "feature" chosen by a developer that no user ever requested cannot be implemented as "opt-in". Should users that do not wish to subject themselves to the "feature" use the software
Is ChatGPT chat history a "feature"
Your previous ChatGPT conversations show up right in the ChatGPT interface.
They have to store the private conversations to enable users to bring them up in the interface.
This isn't a secretive, hidden data collection. It's a clear and obvious feature right in the product. They're fighting for the ability to not retain secret records of past conversations that have been deleted.
The problem with the court order is that it requires them to keep the conversations even after a user presses the 'Delete' button on them.
OpenAI made a choice in how the feature was and is implemented.
The whole point of ChatGPT conversations is so they can be read by the model on the server.
Conversations are kept around because they can be picked up and continued at any point (I use this feature frequently).
Additionally you can use conversations in their scheduled notification feature, where the conversation is replayed and updates are sent to you, all done on the server.
> OpenAI made a choice in how the feature was and is implemented.
Indeed they did, and it was a sensible choice given how the conversations are used.
- [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/openai-offers-20...
There is nothing in the article that mentions OpenAI being forced to create new logs they don't already have.
This is true in services like Datadog, New Relic, and logging services like Splunk. But even privacy-focused services like Mullvad keep logs for 24 hours to monitor for abuse. So this concept that retaining logs is significantly weaker than not ordering the collection is really a bit of misdirection. I'm not sure whether it's intentional, but it's definitely misleading.
Its needed for the conversation history feature, a core feature of the ChatGPT product
Its like saying "What is the purpose of Google Photos storing millions of private images"
Have you used ChatGPT? Your conversation history is on the left rail
I can search the logs I keep without decompressing
Every user is different and each is free to use whatever software they want
No
Large number of upvotes on the quoted comment however. Maybe some of those voters are ChatGPT users
I do searching from the command line in text mode. The script I use keeps a "log" (a customised SERP) of all query strings and search result URLs. I also have these URLs stored in the logs from the forward proxy. These are compressed using RePair. I can search the compressed logs faster this way than with something like
ztsd -dc log.zst|grep pattern
rg -z pattern log.zstGiven that, I'd suggest not offering "alternatives" to the features described in TFA for a service you've never used. There are people here talking about oranges, a lot of them with domain expertise, and you're not just talking about apples, you're talking about bird migrations.
Okay well it's a chat app where you chat directly with an LLM. The way LLMs work is you feed the entire chat history into it, and it generates the next message. Therefore, there's no way you can chat with it without storing the history. It's impossible
Sure, and also downvotes - that measures factionalism, not correctness.
But tech wise, you're confused. Functionally speaking chatgpt is a shared document editor - the server needs to store chat histories for the same reason Google Docs stores the content of documents. Users can submit text to chatgpt.com from one browser, and later edit that text from the app or a different browser. Ergo the text is stored on the server, simple as that.
3 versus 190+, so far
Many commenters cannot distinguish rhetorical questions from questions that seek an answer
By attempting to answer a rhetorical question one may only strengthen the point being made by the question, for example, poor decision-making, and may reveal an absence self-awareness
To do this, I first insert a blank line at the top of each log file before adding to the tarball
IME, RePair is faster than compressing with zstd and the size reduction is almost the same
The only "catch" is that RePair requires more memory during compression
Unfortunately, different searches for this RePair you mentioned have only revealed links to resources for repairing broken air compressors, damaged compressed files, spinal injuries, etc.
Instead of writing open letters they could of course do something about it. Even Google stopped storing your location timeline on their servers and now have it per-device only.
In fact, as far as I understand it, they could not be made public by the plaintiffs even if they wanted to do so, or even if one of their employees decided to leak them.
That's because the plaintiffs themselves never actually see the documents. They will only be seen by the plaintiff's lawyers and any experts hired by those lawyers to analyze them.
https://ia801205.us.archive.org/1/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.61...
OpenAI October 30, 2025 Letter Opposing Motion to Compel
https://ia601205.us.archive.org/1/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.61...
November 7, 2025 Order on Motion to Compel
https://ia601205.us.archive.org/1/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.61...
"OpenAI has failed to explain how its consumers privacy rights are not adequately protected by: (1) the existing protective order in this multidistrict litigation or (2) OpenAIs exhaustive de-identification of all of the 20 million Consumer ChatGPT Logs.1
1. As News Plaintiffs point out, OpenAI has spent the last two and a half months processing and deidentifying this 20 million record sample. (ECF 719 at 1 n.1)."
https://ide.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/w23815.pdf
Companies operating popular www search engines might claim that the need for longer retention is "to provide better service" or some similar reason that focuses on users' interests rather than the company's interests^2
2. Generally, advertising services
This paper attempts to expose such claims as bogus
1. According to some reports OpenAI is sending some queries to Google
For users affected by OpenAI's conduct, an "answer" makes no difference. Anyone can construct any "answer" they want and we can see that in this thread. For users affected by OpenAI's conduct, it does not matter
In the above paper on search engines, the claim was that longer retention of sensitive data leads to better search. This was the "answer" presented in response to the question of "why"
But the "answer" is only misdirection. The companies have no reputation for being honest and their operations are non-transparent. Accordingly, user focus will be on the consequences for users of the company's practices, not "why"
Some readers are probably too young to have read through the AOL search data
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_log_release
Did anyone care "why" AOL released the data
IMHO, it is unfortunate that papers like the one above need to published
The question of "why" is rhetorical. It is meant to the draw attention to the consequences for users, not to seek an "answer"
HN replies might try to answer this as well but the answer is already known to the world
The conversations will be made available to the plaintiffs' (including New York Times') attorneys and the plaintiffs' attorneys' experts
If OpenAI did not store such conversations as a matter of practice before being sued, then there would be no private conversations to make available to the plaintiffs' attorneys and their experts
275 upvotes
AFAICT, most HN readers did _not_ misintepret the question
HN replies != HN, it is a small subset of the readership
To train the AI further. Obviously. Simple as.
Why do chat histories need to be accessible by OpenAI, its service partners and anyone with the authority to request them from OpenAI
If users want this design, as suggested by HN commenters, if users want their chat histories to be accessible to OpenAI, its service providers and anyone with authority to request them from OpenAI, then wouldn't it also be true that these users are not much concerned with "privacy"
If so, then why would OpenAI proclaim they are "fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy", knowing that NYT is prohibited from making the logs public and users generally do not care much about "privacy" anyway
The restrictions on plaintiff NYT's use of the logs are greater than the restrictions, if any,^1 on OpenAI's use of them
1. If any such restrictions existed, for example if OpenAI stated "We don't do X" in a "privacy policy" and people interpreted this as a legally enforceable restriction,^2 how would a user verify that the statement was true, i.e., that OpenAI has not violated the "restriction". Silicon Valley companies like OpenAI are highly secretive
2. As opposed to a statement by OpenAi of what OpenAI allegedly does not do. Compare with a potentially legally-enforceable promise such as "OpenAI will not do X". Also consider that OpenAI may do Y, Z, etc. and make no mention of it to anyone. As it happens Silicon Valley companies generally have a reputation for dishonesty
OpenAI could store the chat conversation in an encrypted format that only you, the user, can decrypt, with the client-side determining the amount of previous messages to include for additional context, but there's plenty of user overhead involved in an undertaking like that (likely a separate decryption password would be needed to ensure full user-exclusive access, etc).
I'd appreciate and use a feature like that, but I doubt most "average" users would care.
Ever since I put the effort into Syncthing across my all devices (paired with restic on one of them for backup), I can't help but see how cross-device functionality and cloud this are the Sysco hash potatoes that balloons Big Corp services' profit margins.
Not saying it's easy to set up. But when you get there it's so liberating and you wish all software was bring-your-own-network.
I absolutely want OpenAI to keep all of my chats and I absolutely don't want them to share them ( voluntarily or by force) with any private agent.
I have exactly the same expectation of any document or communication platform. It's been long established as accepted compomise between security and convenience.
People access ChatGPT through different interfaces: Web, desktop app, their phones, tablets.
Therefore the conversations are stored on the servers. It's really not some hidden plot against users to steal their data. It's just how most users expect their apps to work.
For example, I save all the POST request bodies I send over the internet in the local forward proxy's log. I add logs to tarballs and compress with an algorithm that allows for searching the logs in the tarballs without decompressing them
It does not matter what "reason" or "excuse" or "explanation" anyone presents, technical or otherwise, for why OpenAi does what it does
The issue is what are the consequences
If you have ever played with the api, its clear as day that the protocol itself is stateless.
I'm glad the NYT is fighting them. They've infringed the rights of almost every news outlet but someone has to bring this case.
They have proven that they are the most untrustworthy company on the planet
And this isn't AI fear speaking. This is me raging at Sam Altman for spreading so much fear, uncertainty, and doubt just to get investments. The rest of us have to suffer for the last two years, worrying about losing our jobs, only to find out the AGI lie is complete bullsh*t.
Lavabit opted to stop operating rather than give the FBI access to client emails.
https://archive.ph/20200915083857/https://www.nytimes.com/20...
But conversations people thought they were having with OpenAI in private are now going to be scoured by the New York Times' lawyers. I'm aware of the third party doctrine and that if you put something online it can never be actually private. But I think this also runs counter to people's expectations when they're using the product.
In copyright cases, typically you need to show some kind of harm. This case is unusual because the New York Times can't point to any harm, so they have to trawl through private conversations OpenAI's customers have had with their service to see if they can find any.
It's quite literally a fishing expedition.
NYTimes has produced credible evidence that OpenAI is simply stealing and republishing their content. The question they have to answer is "to what extent has this happened?"
That's a question they fundamentally cannot answer without these chat logs.
That's what discovery, especially in a copyright case, is about.
Think about it this way. Let's say this were a book store selling illegal copies of books. A very reasonable discovery request would be "Show me your sales logs". The whole log needs to be produced otherwise you can't really trust that this is the real log.
That's what NYTimes lawyers are after. They want the chat logs so they can do their own searches to find NYTimes text within the responses. They can't know how often that's happened and OpenAI has an obvious incentive to simply say "Oh that never happened".
And the reason this evidence is relevant is it will directly feed into how much money NYT and OpenAI will ultimately settle for. If this never happens then the amount will be low. If it happens a lot the amount will be high. And if it goes to trial it will be used in the damages portion assuming NYT wins.
The user has no right to privacy. The same as how any internet service can be (and have been) compelled to produce private messages.
The trouble with this logic is NYT already made that argument and lost as applied to an original discovery scope of 1.4 billion records. The question now is about a lower scope and about the means of review, and proposed processes for anonymization.
They have a right to some form of discovery, but not to a blank check extrapolation that sidesteps legitimate privacy issues raised both in OpenAIs statement as well as throughout this thread.
The correct term for this is prima facie right.
You do have a right to privacy (arguably) but it is outweighed by the interest of enforcing the rights of others under copyright law.
Similarly, liberty is a prima facie right; you can be arrested for committing a crime.
I certainly do not care about copyright more than my own privacy, and I certainly don't find that interest to be the public's interest, though perhaps it's the interest of legacy corporations and their lobbyists.
What governs or codifies that? I would have expected that there would need to be some kind of specific overriding concern(s) that would need to apply in order to violate my (even limited) expectation of privacy, not just enforcing copyright law in general.
E.g. there's nothing resembling "probable cause" to search my own interactions with ChatGPT for such violations. On what basis can that be justified?
Credible to whom? In their supposed "investigation", they sent a whole page of text and complex pre-prompting and still failed to get the exact content back word for word. Something users would never do anyways.
And that's probably the best they've got as they didn't publish other attempts.
They shouldnt have any rights to data after its released.
>That's a question they fundamentally cannot answer without these chat logs.
They are causing more damage than anything chatGPT could have caused to NYT. Privacy needs to be held higher than corporate privilege.
>Think about it this way. Let's say this were a book store selling illegal copies of books.
Think of it this way, no book should be illegal.
>They can't know how often that's happened and OpenAI has an obvious incentive to simply say "Oh that never happened".
NYT glazers do more to uphold OpenAI as a privacy respecting platform than OpenAI has ever done.
>If this never happens then the amount will be low.
Should be zero, plus compensation to the affected OpenAI users from NYT.
>The user has no right to privacy.
And this needs to be remedied immediately.
>The same as how any internet service can be (and have been) compelled to produce private messages.
And this needs to be remedied immediately.
They can't use this data against any individual, even if they explicitly asked, "How do I hack the NYT?"
The only potential issue is them finding something juicy in someone's chat, that they could publish as a story; and then claiming they found out about this juicy story through other means, (such as a confidential informant), but that's not likely an issue for the average punter to be concerned about.
The legal term is "expectation of privacy", and it does exist, albeit increasingly weakly in the US. There are exceptions to that, such as a subpoena, but that doesn't mean anyone can subpoena anything for any reason. There has to be a legal justification.
It's not clear to me that such a justification exists in this case.
Your claim doesn’t hold up, my friend. It’s inaccurate because nobody archives an entire dialogue with a seller for the record, and you certainly don’t have to show identification to purchase a book.
"Credible" my ass. They hired "experts" who used prompt engineering and thousands of repetitions to find highly unusual and specific methods of eliciting text from training data that matched their articles. OpenAI has taken measures to limit such methods and prevent arbitrary wholesale reproduction of copyrighted content since that time. That would have been the end of the situation if NYT was engaging in good faith.
The NYT is after what they consider "their" piece of the pie. They want to insert themselves as middlemen - pure rent seeking, second hander, sleazy lawyer behavior. They haven't been injured, they were already dying, and this lawsuit is a hail mary attempt at grifting some life support.
Behavior like that of the NYT is why we can't have nice things. They're not entitled to exist, and by engaging in behavior like this, it makes me want them to stop existing, the faster, the better.
Copyright law is what you get when a bunch of layers figure out how to encode monetization of IP rights into the legal system, having paid legislators off over decades, such that the people that make the most money off of copyrights are effectively hoarding those copyrights and never actually produce anything or add value to the system. They rentseek, gatekeep, and viciously drive off any attempts at reform or competition. Institutions that once produced valuable content instead coast on the efforts of their predecessors, and invest proceeds into lawsuits, lobbying, and purchase of more IP.
They - the NYT - are exploiting a finely tuned and deliberately crafted set of laws meant to screw actual producers out of percentages. I'm not a huge OpenAI fan, but IP laws are a whole different level of corrupt stupidity at the societal scale. It's gotcha games all the way down, and we should absolutely and ruthlessly burn down that system of rules and salt the ground over it. There are trivially better systems that can be explained in a single paragraph, instead of requiring books worth of legal code and complexities.
> They hired "experts" who used prompt engineering and thousands of repetitions to find highly unusual and specific methods of eliciting text from training data that matched their articles....would have been the end of the situation if NYT was engaging in good faith.
I mean, if I was performing a bunch of investigative work and my publication was considered the source of truth in a great deal of journalistic effort and publication of information, and somebody just stole my newspaper off the back of a delivery truck every day and started rewriting my articles, and then suddenly nobody read my paper anymore because they could just ask chatgpt for free, that's a loss for everyone, right?
Even if I disagree with how they editorialize, the Times still does a hell of a lot of journalism, and chatgpt can never, and will never be able to actually do journalism.
> they want to insert themselves as middlemen - pure rent seeking, second hander, sleazy lawyer behavior
I'd love to hear exactly what you mean by this.
Between what and what are they trying to insert themselves as middlemen, and why is chatgpt the victim in their attempts to do it?
What does 'rent seeking' mean in this context?
What does 'second hander' mean?
I'm guessing that 'sleazy lawyer' is added as an intensifier, but I'm curious if it means something more specific than that as well, I suppose.
> Copyright law....the rest of it
Yeah. IP rights and laws are fucked basically everywhere. I'm not smart enough to think of ways to fix it, though. If you've got some viable ideas, let's go fix it. Until then, the Times kinda need to work with what we've got. Otherwise, OpenAI is going to keep taking their lunch money, along with every other journalist's on the internet, until there's no lunch money to be had from anyone.
This is nonsense. I’ve personally been involved in these things, and fought to protect user privacy at all levels and never lost.
NYT is suing for statutory copyright infringement. That means you only need to demonstrate that the copyright infringement, since the infringement alone is considered harm; the actual harm only matters if you're suing for actual damages.
This case really comes down to the very unsolved question of whether or not AI training and regurgitation is copyright infringement, and if so, if it's fair use. The actual ways the AI is being used is thus very relevant for the case, and totally within the bounds of discovery. Of course, OpenAI has also been engaging this lawsuit with unclean hands in the first place (see some of their earlier discovery dispute fuckery), and they're one of the companies with the strongest "the law doesn't apply to US because we're AI and big tech" swagger.
What they want is to kill training, and more over, prevent the loss of being the middle-man between events and users.
So... they want to continue reporting news, and they don't want their news reports to be presented to users in a place where those users are paying someone else and not them. How horrible of them?
If NYT is not reporting news, then NYT news reports will not be available for AIs to ingest. They can perhaps still get some of that data from elsewhere, perhaps from places that don't worry about the accuracy of the news (or intentionally produces inaccurate news). You have to get signal from somewhere, just the noise isn't enough, and killing off the existing sources of signal (the few remaining ones) is going to make that a lot harder.
The question is, does journalism have a place in a world with AIs, and should OpenAI be the one deciding the answer to that question?
I'm confused by this phrase. I may be misreading but it sounds like you're frustrated, or at least cynical about NYT wanting to preserve their business model of writing about things that happen and selling the publication. To me it seems reasonable they'd want to keep doing that, and to protect their content from being stolen.
They certainly aren't the sole publication of written content about current events, so calling them "the middle-man between events and users" feels a bit strange.
If your concern is that they're trying to prevent OpenAI from getting a foot in the door of journalism, that confuses me even more. There are so, so many sources of news: other news agencies, independent journalists, randos spreading word-of-mouth information.
It is impossible for chatgpt to take over any aspect of being a "middle-man between events and users" because it can't tell you the news. it can only resynthesize journalism that it's stolen from somewhere else, and without stealing from others, it would be worse than the least reliable of the above sources. How could it ever be anything else?
This right here feels like probably a good understanding of why NYT wants openai to keep their gross little paws off their content. If I stole a newspaper off the back of a truck, and then turned around and charged $200 a month for the service of plagiarizing it to my customers, I would not be surprised if the Times's finest lawyers knocked on my door either.
Then again, I may be misinterpreting what you said. I tend to side with people who sue LLM companies for gobbling up all their work and regurgitating it, and spend zero effort trying to avoid that bias
OpenAI is free to do own reporting. NY Times is nowhere near trying to prevent others for competing as middleman.
It helps to read the complaint. If that was the case, the case would have been subject to a Rule 12(b)(6) (failure to state a claim for which relief can be granted) challenge and closed.
Complaint: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20...
See pages 60ff.
> 167. As a direct and proximate result of Defendants’ infringing conduct alleged herein, The Times has sustained and will continue to sustain substantial, immediate, and irreparable injury for which there is no adequate remedy at law. Unless Defendants’ infringing conduct is enjoined by this Court, Defendants have demonstrated an intent to continue to infringe the copyrighted works. The Times therefore is entitled to permanent injunctive relief restraining and enjoining Defendants’ ongoing infringing conduct. > 168. The Times is further entitled to recover statutory damages, actual damages, restitution of profits, attorneys’ fees, and other remedies provided by law.
They're simply claiming harm, nothing more. I want to see injuries, scars, and blood if there's harm. As far as I can tell, the NYT was on the ropes long before AI came along. If they could actually articulate any harm, they wouldn't need to read through everyone's chats.
This wasn't solid enough for a summary judgement, and it seems the labs have largely figured out how to stop the models from doing this. So it looks like NYT wants to comb all user chats rather than pay a team of people tens of thousands a day to try an coax articles out of ChatGPT-5.
I think the winner are Chinese (and by extension OSS) models as they can ignore copyright. A net win, I think.
As a fan and DAU of both OpenAI and the NYT, this is just a weird discovery demand and there should be another pathway for these two to move fwd in this case (NYT to get some semblance of understanding, OAI protecting end-user privacy).
I don't blieve that OpenAI, or any American corporation, has the wherewithal to actually maintain _your_ privacy in the face of _their_ profitability.
> typically you need to show some kind of harm.
You copied my material without my permission. I've been harmed. That right is independent of pricing. Otherwise Napster would never have generated legal cases.
> It's quite literally a fishing expedition.
It's why American courts are awesome.
It feels like the NYT is really fishing for inside information on how GPT is used so they can run statistical analysis and write articles about it. I.E. if they find examples of racism, they can get some great articles about how racism is rampant on GPT or something.
When Altman says "They claim they might find examples of you using ChatGPT to try to get around their paywall." he is blatantly misrepresenting the case.
https://smithhopen.com/2025/07/17/nyt-v-openai-microsoft-ai-...
"The lawsuit focuses on using copyrighted material for AI training. The NYT says OpenAI and Microsoft copied vast amounts of its content. They did this to build generative AI tools. These tools can output near-exact copies of NYT articles. Therefore, the NYT argues this breaks copyright laws. It also hurts journalism by skipping paywalls and cutting traffic to original sites. The complaint shows examples where ChatGPT mimics NYT stories closely. This could lead to money loss and harm from AI errors, called hallucinations."
This has nothing to do with the users, it has everything to do with OpenAI profiting off of pirated copyrighted material.
Also, Altmans is getting scared because the NY Times proved to the judge that CahtGPT copied many articles:
"2025 brings big steps in the case. On March 26, 2025, Judge Sidney Stein rejected most of OpenAI’s dismissal motion. This lets the NYT’s main copyright claims go ahead. The judge pointed to “many” examples of ChatGPT copying NYT articles. He found them enough to continue. This ruling dropped some side claims, like unfair competition. But it kept direct and contributory infringement, plus DMCA breaches."
Well that's going to go pretty poorly for them considering it has already been ruled fair use twice: https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/two-california-distr...
On the other hand, distributing copies of NYT content is actually a breach of copyright, but only if the NYT can prove it was actually happening.
I felt quite some disappointment with the comments I saw on the thread at that time.
...had never been private in the first place.
not only is the data used for refining the models, OpenAI had also shariah policed plenty of people for generating erotica.
Also, you need to understand, that for huge corps like OpenAI, the lying on your ToS will do orders of magnitude more damage to your brand than what you would gain through training on <1% more user chats. So no, they are not lying when they say they don't train on private chats.
That framing is retorically brilliant if you think about it. I will use that more. Chat Sharia Law for Chat Control. Mass Sharia Surveillance from flock etc.
Little do they know that I care very little for either party and enjoy seeing both of them squirm. You went to business school, not me. Work it out.
In this case, it's awfully suspicious that OpenAI is worried about The New York Times finding literal passages in their articles that ChatGPT spits out verbatim. If your AI doesn't do that, like you say, then why would it be a problem to check?
Finally, both parties should find a neutral third party. The neutral third party gets the full text of every NYT article and ChatGPT transcript, and finds the matches. NYT doesn't get ChatGPT transcripts. OpenAI doesn't get the full text of every NYT article (even though they have to already have that). Everyone is happy. If OpenAI did something illegal, the court can find out. If they didn't, then they're safe. I think it would be very fair.
(I take the side of neither party. I'm not a huge fan of training language models on content that wasn't licensed for that purpose. And I'm not a huge fan of The NYT's slide to the right as they cheerlead the end of the American experiment.)
That's next to impossible. And if that party fails to be neutral you've just generated a new lawsuit entangled with this one.
The current procedure is each side gets their own expert. The two expert can duke it out and the crucible of the courtroom decides who was more credible.
Maybe the NYT needs to bloom-filter-ify their articles in 10 word chunks (or something, I don't know enough about linguistics to tell you what's unique enough for copyright infringement or to prove "copying"), have OpenAI search transcripts, and turn over the matches. That limits the scope of the search dramatically, but is still invasive.
let them fight.
Both companies are clearly wrong here. There is a small part of me that kinda wants openai to loose this, just so maybe it will be a wake up call to people putting in way too personal of information into these services? Am I too hopeful here that people will learn anything...
Fundamentally I agree with what they are saying though, just don't find it genuine in the slightest coming from them.
Also their framing of the NYT intent makes me strongly distrust anything they say. Sit down with a third party interviewer who asks challenging questions, and I'll pay attention.
…”as does any culpability for poisoning yourself, suicide, and anything else we clearly enabled but don’t want to be blamed for!”
Edit: honestly I’m surprised I left out the bit where they just indiscriminately scraped everything they could online to train these models. The stones to go “your data belongs to you” as they clearly feel entitled to our data is unbelievably absurd
Should walmart be "culpable" for selling rope that someone hanged themselves with? Should google be "culpable" for returning results about how to commit suicide?
And lo, complaints about plaintiffs started before I even had to scroll. If this company hadn't willy-nilly done everything they could to vacuum up the world's data, wherever it may be, however it may have been protected, then maybe they wouldn't be in this predicament.
Everybody acts like this is a moral argument when really it's about whether or not they're getting a piece of the pie.
So, when google did the same thing, there were complains.
> Why is nobody complaining about Google scraping their sites?
And second, search engines were actually pretty gentle with their sites scrapping. They needed the sites to work, so they respected robots.txt and made sure they wont accidentally DDoS sites by too many requests. AI companies just DDoS sites, do not respect robots.txt and if you block them, they will use another from their infinite amount of IPs.
Otherwise said, even back then, Google was kind trying to be ok non evil citizen. They became sociopathic only much later and even now kind of try to hide it. OpenAI and the rest of AI companies are openly sociopathic and proud of damage they cause.
Their statements are all aspirational, "we're working toward de-identifying" etc. They've built one of the most powerful AIs ever seen and now they're claiming it's difficult to delete, de-identify / anonymize. Maybe they should ask their AI to do it :-)
It's impossible to take this company seriously. They're nothing but a carny barker stealing everything of value that they can lay their (creepy) hands on.
Probably because they have a lot to hide, a lot to lose, and no interest in fair play.
Theoretically, they could prove their tools aren’t being used to doing anything wrong but practically, we all know they can’t because they are actually in the wrong (in both the moral and, IMO though IANAL, the legal sense). They know it, we know it, the only problem is breaking the ridiculous walled garden that stops the courts from ‘knowing’ it.
You don't have to think that OpenAI is good to think there's a legitimate issue over exposing data to a third party for discovery. One could see the Times discovering something in private conversations outside the scope of the case, but through their own interpretation of journalistic necessity, believe it's something they're obligated to publish.
Part of OpenAI holding up their side of the bargain on user data, to the extent they do, is that they don't roll over like a beaten dog to accommodate unconditional discovery requests.
It's OpenAI's data, there is a protective order in the case and OpenAI already agreed to anonymize it all.
>Part of OpenAI holding up their side of the bargain on user data, to the extent they do, is that they don't roll over like a beaten dog to accommodate unconditional discovery requests.
lol... what?
Maybe you didn't read TFA but part of the case history was NYT requesting 1.4 billion records as part of discovery and being successfully challenged by OpenAI as unnecessary, and the essence of TFA is advocating for an alternative to the scope of discovery NYT is insisting on, hence the "not rolling over".
Try reading, it's fun!
That is proving a negative. You are never required to prove a negative.
> the only problem is breaking the ridiculous walled garden that stops the courts from ‘knowing’ it.
The "problem" of privacy?
-- openai
remember a corporation generally is an object owned by some people. Do you trust "unspecified future group of people" with your privacy? You can't. Best we can do is understand the information architecture and act accordingly.
I don’t recall seeing many food, furniture, plant, or generally anything not related to tech talking about trust, security, and privacy as guiding principles.
-- openai, probably.
The way I see it, the problem is that OpenAI employees can look at the chats and the fact that some NYT lawyer can look at it doesn't make me more uncomfortable. Insane argumentation. It's like saying an investigator with a court-order should not be allowed to look at stored copies of letters, although the company sending those letters a) looks at them regularly b) stores these copies in the first place.
I am pretty sure this isn't true. They have to have some sort of K-V cache system to make continuing conversations cheaper.
Isn't that exactly what they're trying to find by looking through OpenAI customers' conversations?
I thought they did? The warning currently says
>This chat won't appear in history, use or update ChatGPT's memory, or be used to train our models. For safety purposes, we may keep a copy of this chat for up to 30 days.
But AFAIK it was this way before the lawsuit as well.
The dodgy thing is that they don't now warn users that all chats, including temporary, are now "Bcc: NYT"
And what if they for example find evidence of X other thing such as:
1. Something useful for a story, maybe they follow up in parallel. Know who to interview and what to ask?
2. A crime.
3. An ongoing crime.
4. Something else they can sue someone else for.
5. Top secret information
It'll be the lawyers who need to go through the data, and given the scale of it, they won't be able to do anything more than trawl for the evidence they need and find specific examples to cite. They don't give a shit if you're asking chatgpt how to put a hit out on your ex, and they're not there to editorialize.
I wont pretend to guess* how they'll perform the discovery, but I highly doubt it will result in humans reading more than a handful of the records in total outside of the ones found via whatever method they automate the discovery process.
If there's top secret information in there, and it was somehow stumbled upon by one of these lawyers or a paralegal somewhere, I find it impossibly unlikely they'd be stupid enough to do anything other than run directly to whomever is the rightful possessor of said information and say "hey we found this in this place it shouldn't be" and then let them deal with it. Which is what we'd want them to do.
*Though if I had to speculate on how they'd do it, I do think the funniest way would be to feed the records back into chatgpt and ask it to point out all the times the records show evidence of infringement
2. That sounds useful.
3. That sounds useful.
4. That sounds useful.
5. That sounds useful.
Are these supposed to be examples of things that shouldn't be found out about? This has to be the worst pro-privacy argument I've ever seen on the internet. "Privacy is good because they will find out about our crimes"
what protection does user data typically have during legal discovery in a civil suit like this where the defendant is a service provider but relevant evidence is likely present in user data?
Does a judge have to weigh a users' expectation of privacy against the request? Do terms of service come into play here (who actually owns the data? what privacy guarantees does the company make?).
I'm assuming in this case that the request itself isn't overly broad and seems like a legitimate use of the discovery process.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/06/what-llms-kno...
At some point they'll monetize these dossiers.
Communications with an AI system do not involve a human so are not protected by ECPA or the SCA and get less protection. This is controversial and some people have called on ECPA/SCA to be extended to cover AI services. That means a warrant would be necessary to get your OpenAI history, not just a subpoena.
That’s not justice. That’s legal extortion.
I get that people are angry at OpenAI. But let’s not confuse outrage over one company with support for broken systems. Patent and copyright trolls thrive when we normalize overreach, whether it’s AI training data or email threads. If we let corporations weaponize IP law to control every digital whisper, we’re not protecting creators, we’re burying free expression under a mountain of lawsuits.
If you made it your business to publish a newsletter containing copied NYT articles, then wouldn't they have the right to go after you and discover your sent emails?
Your example is not nearly an example of copyright troll or overreach.
If this is truly my data then it should be okay for me to download it and train my own model on it right?
Nope, that would explicitly be disallowed under the terms OpenAI has made me sign and they would ban my account and maybe even sue me for it.
So yeah, they are full of shit.
Private? Aren’t they stored in a third party server, subject to OpenAI terms of service and all sorts of relevant laws?
1. search conversations for PII they know of for the given user and redact
2. use their own models to scrub the conversations of non-verbatim mentions
That on top of every lie they told, every value they betrayed, every line they crossed, they still have the nerve to blog about being the good guy!
The constitution is clear that the purpose of intellectual property is to promote progress. I feel that OpenAI is on the right side of that and this is not IP theft as long as they aren't reproducing others work in a non-transformative way.
Training the AI is clearly transformative (and lossy to boot). Giving the AI the ability to scrape and paraphrase others work is less clear and both sides each have valid arguments. I don't envy the judges that must make that call.
No, its not. See the PDF of the actual case below.
The case is largely about OpenAI training on the NY Times articles without permission. They do allege that it can reproduce their articles verbatim at times, but that's not the central allegation as it's obviously a bug and not an intentional infringement. You have to get way down to item 98 before they even allege it.
https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20...
They could’ve asked permission. They could have worked with content providers instead of scraping. But they didn’t - and they knew what could happen.
FA (with fair use boundaries) and FO
-OpenAI
Hard to be sympathetic with OpenAI here.
This is funny!
I think I have enough with the first sentence, no need to read more. The narration is clear, we are the brain and no one can stop us.
OpenAI may be trying to paint themselves as the goody-two-shoes here, but they're not.
> We may use Personal Data for the following purposes: [...] To comply with legal obligations and to protect the rights, privacy, safety, or property of our users, OpenAI, or third parties.
OpenAI outright says it will give your conversations to people like lawyers.
If you thought they wouldn't give it out to third parties, you not only have not read OpenAI's privacy policy, you've not read any privacy policy from a big tech company (because all of them are basically maximalist "your privacy is important, we'll share your data only with us and people who we deem worthy of it, which turns out to be everybody.")
You can argue about "the expectation" of privacy all you want, but this is completely detached from reality. My assumption is that almost no third parties I share information with have magic immunity that prevents the information from being used in a legal action involving them.
Maybe my doctor? Maybe my lawyer? IANAL but I'm not even confident in those. If I text my friend saying their party last night was great and they're in court later and need to prove their whereabouts that night, I understand that my text is going to be used as evidence. That might be a private conversation, but it's not my data when I send it to someone else and give them permission to store it forever.
Can I just say that everyone sucks here and I hope they both lose somehow?
What I don't understand is why they can't have a third party handle the data. Why does the NYT need it itself?
I wish I had a solution, so we could all feel a sense of freedom and pressure lifted from our thoughts and actions. But I only see this getting worse.
So am I upset that the NYT's lawyers want access to the records... a little. It's an invasion of privacy. But I'm more upset that they have anything to dig through to begin with.
If only we could see how things within all these companies we are forced to trust actually work. If only OpenAI was actually open. When will we all learn to demand open source, open platform services. Capitalize the development, and capitalize the infrastructure, but leave the process and operations out in the open so users can make informed decisions again. Normalize it like how homes are normally inspected before being purchased.
It's not like the NYT will be published this shit in the news. Their lawyers and experts will have access to make a legal case, under a protective order. I'm not going to lose my law license because I'm doing doc review and you asked it something naughty and I think it's funny.
Courts and lawyers deal with this stuff all the time. What's very very weird to me is how upset OpenAI is about it.
They look like they are hiding something.
That little bit of morality - truth, honesty, integrity, etc. - is essential to a functioning society that leans toward good outcomes. (Often it seems that many just assume we'll get good outcomes, not that they must work hard to make it happen.)
> Q: Is the NYT obligated to keep this data private?
> A: Yes. The Times would be legally obligated at this time to not make any data public outside the court process.
The NY Times has built over a century a reputation for fiercely protecting its confidential sources. Why are they somehow less trustworthy than OpenAI is?
If the NY Times leaked the customer information to a third party, they'd be in contempt of court. On the other hand, OpenAI is bound only by their terms of service with its customers, which they can modify as they please.
For example, if they find Mayor X asking ChatGPT about fraud, porn, DUI, cancer diagnoses, murder, etc. - maybe even mentioning names, places, etc. - they could then investigate that issue, find other evidence, and publish that.
Let me rewrite this without propaganda:
Despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on lawyers, we couldn't persuade the judge that our malfeasance should be kept from the light of day.
The New York Times is demanding that we turn over 20 million of your private
ChatGPT conversations. They claim they might find examples of you using
ChatGPT to try to get around their paywall.* I am not too familiar with this matter and hence definitely am not rooting for one party or another. Asking this just out of technical curiosity.
L O L
In direct contrast: I fully agree with OpenAI here. We can have a more nuanced opinion than 'piracy to train AI is bad therefore refusing to share chats is bad', which sounds absurd but is genuinely how one of the other comments follows logic.
Privacy is paramount. People _trust_ that their chats are private: they ask sensitive questions, ones to do with intensely personal or private or confidential things. For that to be broken -- for a company to force users to have their private data accessed -- is vile.
The tech community has largely stood against this kind of thing when it's been invasive scanning of private messages, tracking user data, etc. I hope we can collectively be better (I'm using ethical terms for a reason) than the other replies show. We don't have to support OpenAI's actions in order to oppose the NYT's actions.
IMO we can have multiple views over multiple companies and actions. And the sort of discussions I value here on HN are ones where people share insight, thought, show some amount of deeper thinking. I wanted to challenge for that with my comment.
_If_ we agree the NYT even has a reason to examine chats -- and I think even that should be where the conversation is -- I agree that there should be other ways to achieve it without violating privacy.
If you store data it can come up in discovery during lawsuits and criminal cases. Period.
E.g., storing illegal materials on Google Drive, Google WILL turn that over to the authorities if there’s a warrant or lawsuit that demands it in discovery.
E.g., my CEO writes an email telling the CFO that he doesn’t want to issue a safety recall because it’ll cost too much money. If I sue the company for injuring me through a product they know to be defective, that civil suit subpoena can ask for all emails discussing the matter and there’s no magical wall of privacy where the company can just say “no that’s private information.”
At the same time, I don’t get to trawl through the company’s emails and use some email the CEO flirting with their secretary as admissible evidence.
There are many ways the court is able to ensure privacy for the individuals. Sexual assault victims don’t have their evidence blasted across the the airwaves just because the court needs to examine that physical evidence.
The only way to avoid this is to not collect the data in the first place, which is where end to end encryption with user-controlled keys or simply not collecting information comes into play.
The tech community has been doing the scanning and tracking.
These chats only need to be shared because:
- OpenAI pirated masses of content in the first place
- OpenAI refuse to own up to it even now (they spin the NYT claims as "baseless").
I don't agree with them giving my chats out either, but the blame is not with the NYT in my opinion.
> We don't have to support OpenAI's actions in order to oppose the NYT's actions.
Well the NYT action is more than just its own. It will set a precedent if they win which means other news outlets can get money from OpenAI as well. Which makes a lot of sense, after all they have billions to invest in hardware, why not in content??
And what alternative do they have? Without OpenAI giving access to the source materials used (I assume this was already asked for because it is the most obvious route) there is not much else they can do. And OpenAI won't do that because it will prove the NYT point and will cause them to have to pay a lot to half the world.
It's important that this case is made, not just for the NYT but for journalism in general.
- Is it part of a slow process of eroding public expectations of data privacy while blaming it on an external actor?
- Is it to undermine trust in traditional media, in an effort to increase dependence on AI companies as a source of truth?
- Is something else I'm not seeing?
I'm guessing it's all three of these?
[1] Those emails that came up in the suit with Elon Musk, followed by his eventual complete takeover of OpenAI, and the elaborate process of getting himself installed as chairman of the Reddit board to get the original founders back in control are prominent examples.
I can’t fix global warming by myself so I’m going to do nothing.
Politicians don’t listen to my age group so I don’t vote.
I can’t donate to every charity so I won’t donate to any.
Everyone else ignores traffic laws so why should I care?
Meanwhile, OpenAI talking about invading privacy sounds an awful lot like a claim with unclean hands.
OpenAI is lying about why they are doing this. They want the public to attack the New York Times because OpenAI probably broke the law in so many ways...
If they cared about privacy they would no training their models on that same private data. But here we are.
We need very strong regulations to rule in all these tech companies and make them work for their users instead of working against them and lying about it.
Maybe if you didn't scrape every single site on the internet they wouldn't have a basis for their case that you've stolen all of their articles through training your models on them. If anyone is to blame for this its openAI, not the NYT.
Play stupid games win stupid prizes.
Also down to 20M from 120M per court order.
Sorry, but this seems a completely reasonable standard for discovery to me given the total lack of privacy on the platform - especially for free users.
Also sorry it probably means you’re going to owe a lot of money to the Times.
Under those circumstances, why wouldn't NYT have a case? I advise everybody who employs some sort of DRM or online system that limits access to ask for every chat that every one of these companies has ever had with anyone. Why are they the only people who get to break copyright and hacking laws? Why are they the only people who get to have private conversations?
I might also check if any LLMs have ever endorsed terrorist points of view (or banned political parties) during a chat, because even though those points of view may be correct (depending on the organization), endorsing them may be illegal and make you subject to sanctions or arrest. If people can't just speak, certainly corporate LLMs shouldn't be able to.
Of course the Times wants more evidence that the content OpenAI allegedly stole is ending in things OpenAI is selling.
This isn't even a hyperbole. It's literally the same thing.
Man, the sooner this company goes bankrupt the better.
Is this a joke? We all know people do this. There is no "might" in it. They WILL find it.
OpenAI is trying to make it look like this is a breach of user's privacy, when the reality is that it's operating like a pirate website and if it were investigated that would become proven.
This is so transparently icky. "Oh woe is us! We're being sued and we're looking out for YOU the user, who is definitely not the product. We are just a 'lil 'ol (near) trillion-dollar business trying to protect you!"
Come ON.
Look I don't actually know who's in the right in the OAI vs. NYT dispute, and frankly I personally lean more toward the side the says that you are allowed to train models on the world's information as long as you consume it legally and don't violate copyright.
But this transparent attempt to get user sympathy under insanely disingenuous pretenses is just absurd.
Chats contain way too much sensitive private data to subject them to bulk fishing expeditions
It gives an interesting insight into politics and the modern Democrat party that the newspaper of the wealthy leans so strongly left. This was even before Trump came to power.
That's simply a function of the fact it's a controversial news organization running a dragnet on private communications to a technology platform.
"Great cases, like hard cases, make bad law."
Except for OpenAI, apparently.
OpenAI is right here. The NYT needs to prove their case another way.
The NYT is certainly open to criticism along many fronts, but I don't have the slightest idea what you mean in claiming it promotes authoritarianism.
There are two things I think about:
First, and generally, an AI ought to be able to ingest content like news articles because it's beneficial for users of AI. I would like to question an AI about current events.
Secondly, however, the legal mechanism by which it does that isn't clear. I think it would be helpful if these outlets would provide the information as long as the AI won't reproduce the content verbatim. If that does not happen, then another framing might liken the AI ingestion as an individual going to the library to read the paper. In that case, we don't require the individual to retroactively pay for the experience or unlearn what he may have learned while at the library.
what are you referencing here?