Seventeen news organizations moved in court Thursday to punish OpenAI for what they called deliberate obstruction in an ongoing copyright dispute. The motion asks a judge to impose sanctions over what the publishers describe as OpenAI hiding and destroying evidence.
According to a report by CNET, the motion was filed by publishers including The New York Times, the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and Ziff Davis, which is the parent company of CNET. The motion claims OpenAI withheld materials such as datasets and output logs, and states that OpenAI chose obstruction by failing to produce them.
"This motion asks the court to punish OpenAI for hiding and destroying evidence showing how ChatGPT was trained on stolen journalism," New York Daily News attorney Steven Lieberman said, per the Associated Press.
The legal fight traces back to 2023, when The New York Times first sued OpenAI and Microsoft. The Times alleged that those companies built their AI technologies using millions of news articles written by journalists. The Times' original lawsuit claims that OpenAI's generative AI tools "can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style." Microsoft and OpenAI have denied those claims.
Ziff Davis joined the litigation in 2025. A statement from the company says that OpenAI has copied and monetized Ziff Davis content without permission on a massive scale. Lance Koonce, a partner at Klaris Law and counsel for Ziff Davis, said that since the lawsuit was filed, OpenAI repeatedly lied about its ability to search its own data sets for Ziff Davis content and engaged in other serious litigation misconduct.
OpenAI has maintained that AI training falls under fair use. An OpenAI spokesperson denied the allegations in a statement to CNET.
At the center of the dispute is how generative AI systems like ChatGPT are trained and how they source information. Publishers say the use of their content without compensation or permission threatens the financial foundation of journalism. Some data cited in the report shows that small publishers have seen a reported 60 percent traffic drop, while another analysis predicts traffic declines of more than 40 percent by 2029.
If the court grants the sanctions, OpenAI could be ordered to pay financial penalties. Microsoft was not named in the sanctions motion.