OpenAI accuses NY Times of wanting to invade millions of users’ privacy in paper’s lawsuit against tech giant
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OpenAI released a blistering statement accusing The New York Times of wanting to invade the privacy of its users as the paper proceeds with its lawsuit against the tech giant.
“Trust, security, and privacy guide every product and decision we make,” OpenAI’s Chief Information Security Officer Dane Stuckey wrote on its website Wednesday. “Each week, 800 million people use ChatGPT to think, learn, create, and handle some of the most personal parts of their lives… We treat this data as among the most sensitive information in your digital life—and we’re building our privacy and security protections to match that responsibility.
“Today, that responsibility is being tested,” he continued. “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. This demand disregards long-standing privacy protections, breaks with common-sense security practices, and would force us to turn over tens of millions of highly personal conversations from people who have no connection to the Times’ baseless lawsuit against OpenAI.”
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Stuckey said OpenAI is asking the court to reject The Times’ demand and that the company will “continue to explore every option available to protect our users’ privacy.”
He also said OpenAI provided “several privacy-preserving options” to The Times including targeted sample searches that include text from the paper’s articles — but was rejected by The Times. Stuckey added that The Times initially wanted access to 1.4 billion ChatGPT conversations, but OpenAI successfully limited the scope to 20 million random conversations between December 2022 and November 2024.
OpenAI assured its users that any personal information will be scrubbed from conversations through a “de-identifying procedure.”
“The New York Times’s case against OpenAI and Microsoft is about holding these companies accountable for stealing millions of copyrighted works to create products that directly compete with The Times,” a spokesperson for The New York Times told Fox News Digital. “In another attempt to cover up its illegal conduct, OpenAI’s blog post purposely misleads its users and omits the facts. No ChatGPT user’s privacy is at risk. The court ordered OpenAI to provide a sample of chats, anonymized by OpenAI itself, under a legal protective order.”
“This fear-mongering is all the more dishonest given that OpenAI’s own terms of service permit the company to train its models on users’ chats and turn over chats for litigation,” the spokesperson added.
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The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, accusing them of using millions of its articles without permission to train the large language model powering ChatGPT.
“Defendants’ generative artificial intelligence (‘GenAI’) tools rely on large-language models (‘LLMs’) that were built by copying and using millions of The Times’s copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides, and more,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit claims that while defendants “engaged in widescale copying from many sources,” OpenAI “gave Times content particular emphasis when building their LLMs — revealing a preference that recognizes the value of those works.”
“Using the valuable intellectual property of others in these ways without paying for it has been extremely lucrative for Defendants,” the lawsuit says. “Microsoft’s deployment of Times-trained LLMs throughout its product line helped boost its market capitalization by a trillion dollars in the past year alone. And OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT has driven its valuation to as high as $90 billion.”
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Fox News’ Bradford Betz contributed to this report.
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