OpenAI lost its bid to dismiss a lawsuit filed by The Intercept, alleging misuse of its articles to train the popular ChatGPT chatbot. The lawsuit, presented in a New York federal court, claims OpenAI unlawfully removed copyright management information from The Intercept’s articles without permission. U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff ruled that the news organization presented a plausible case, unlike the previous dismissal of a related lawsuit against OpenAI last year. However, Rakoff rejected The Intercept’s claim that OpenAI unlawfully distributed its articles after removing copyright details.
Despite some dismissals, Rakoff emphasized that The Intercept’s allegations involved copyright-related harms that are traditionally actionable under copyright law. The judge also cleared Microsoft, OpenAI’s primary financial backer, of involvement in this specific case, noting that Microsoft’s role was not relevant to the AI training aspect of the case.
The Intercept’s legal representative, Matt Topic, expressed satisfaction with the ruling, saying the core of the case would proceed. Meanwhile, OpenAI maintains its position that its models are trained on publicly available data in accordance with fair use principles.
This lawsuit is part of a growing wave of copyright actions against OpenAI and other tech firms by various creators, including authors and artists, over the data used to train generative AI models. Other cases, including a major one filed by The New York Times, are also ongoing.
The case is titled The Intercept Media Inc v. OpenAI Inc (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 1:24-cv-01515).
Read more: