New York Times Says OpenAI Erased Potential Lawsuit Evidence

As part of an ongoing copyright lawsuit, The New York Times says it spent 150 hours sifting through OpenAI’s training data looking for potential evidence—only for OpenAI to delete all of its work.

Lawsuits are never exactly a lovefest, but the copyright fight between The New York Times and both OpenAI and Microsoft is getting especially contentious. This week, the Times alleged that OpenAI’s engineers inadvertently erased data the paper’s team spent more than 150 hours extracting as potential evidence.

OpenAI was able to recover much of the data, but the Times’ legal team says it’s still missing the original file names and folder structure. According to a declaration filed to the court Wednesday by Jennifer B. Maisel, a lawyer for the newspaper, this means the information “cannot be used to determine where the news plaintiffs’ copied articles” may have ...