The New York Times

Founded in 1851, The New York Times is the most influential newspaper in the United States, with a newsroom of roughly 2,000 journalists and over ten million subscribers. In the AI era it has become the standard-bearer for publishers who believe the chatbot boom was built on uncompensated journalism.

The Times v. OpenAI and Microsoft

On December 27, 2023, the Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in Manhattan federal court — the first major American news organization to do so — alleging that millions of its articles were used without permission to train GPT models, that ChatGPT could regurgitate its articles nearly verbatim, and that AI products now compete with its journalism. The suit seeks “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.” In April 2025, Judge Sidney Stein largely denied the defendants’ motions to dismiss, letting the core copyright claims proceed, and by mid-2026 the Times and fellow plaintiffs were urging the court to sanction OpenAI in an escalating discovery fight.

Suing with one hand, licensing with the other

The Times is not opposed to AI so much as to unpaid AI. In May 2025 it signed its first generative AI licensing deal — a multiyear agreement with Amazon, reported at $20–25 million a year, putting Times, NYT Cooking and Athletic content into Alexa and Amazon’s model training. The newsroom has also adopted internal AI tools for editing and research under published guidelines, and its own writers, including columnist Kevin Roose, are among the most-read chroniclers of the technology.

The case is widely viewed as the bellwether for whether training on copyrighted news is fair use; its outcome will shape the economics of both journalism and frontier AI labs.