OpenAI has petitioned a federal judge in New York to overturn a ruling that compels the company to provide 20 million anonymized ChatGPT chat records as part of an ongoing copyright dispute with The New York Times (NYT.N) and several other media organizations.
The artificial intelligence firm argued that complying with the order would compromise user confidentiality and expose private conversations.
In its court filing, OpenAI maintained that the vast majority of the requested data — “99.99%” of it — is unrelated to the copyright allegations being made.
“To be clear: anyone in the world who has used ChatGPT in the past three years must now face the possibility that their personal conversations will be handed over to The Times to sift through at will in a speculative fishing expedition,” the company stated.
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Dispute Over Copyright Use and Data Privacy
The New York Times and its co-plaintiffs contend that the chat records are crucial for determining whether ChatGPT has replicated portions of their copyrighted material.
They also claim that the data could disprove OpenAI’s argument that journalists “hacked” the chatbot’s responses to fabricate evidence. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI improperly used their articles to train ChatGPT and other AI models.
Magistrate Judge Ona Wang, who issued the order, stated that user privacy would remain safeguarded through the company’s “exhaustive de-identification” process and additional protective measures.
The court set a Friday deadline for OpenAI to submit the anonymized transcripts.
In a blog post released Wednesday, OpenAI’s Chief Information Security Officer, Dane Stuckey, said that surrendering the logs would violate privacy and security obligations, forcing the company to “turn over tens of millions of highly personal conversations from people who have no connection to the Times’ baseless lawsuit.”
A New York Times spokesperson, however, dismissed OpenAI’s claims, saying the company’s blog post “purposely misleads its users and omits the facts.”
The spokesperson added, “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 dispute is part of a growing wave of legal battles targeting technology companies accused of using copyrighted material to train their artificial intelligence systems without proper authorization.
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