New York Times lawyers claim OpenAI accidentally deleted evidence in copyright case

The New York Times has filed a letter in its copyright infringement case against OpenAI and Microsoft, alerting the court that the ChatGPT maker accidentally deleted a bunch of data that may have been evidence. 

The letter [PDF], filed yesterday in the Southern District of New York by lawyers for the Times, asserts that OpenAI engineers deleted "all of News Plaintiffs' programs and search result data" from one of two virtual machines set up for the purpose of allowing the plaintiffs to scour OpenAI training data for copyrighted material. 

The lawsuit in question was filed in late 2023, alleging that OpenAI and Microsoft used articles from the Times to train ChatGPT and other models and readily displayed the content of articles from the newspaper when asked - all without permission, the Times claimed. 

"OpenAI has provided the News Plaintiffs with two dedicated virtual machines with improved computing resources for performing their ...