The New York Times and The Daily News have filed a motion accusing OpenAI of deliberately concealing evidence during the ongoing copyright lawsuit. The escalation, announced this week, marks a significant turn in the two-year legal battle. The publishers claim that OpenAI not only denied its ability to search its training data but also secretly developed internal tools to monitor copyright infringements without disclosing them to the court.
Revelations from Vinnie Monaco's deposition
During a court-ordered deposition in April 2026, OpenAI data privacy engineer Vinnie Monaco allegedly admitted that the company had already conducted internal searches to identify copyrighted journalism in its training datasets. This directly contradicts OpenAI's previous claims that it lacked the technical capability to perform such searches. Furthermore, Monaco revealed the existence of a database of approximately 78 million de-identified ChatGPT conversations, used internally to assess the extent of infringement. Additionally, OpenAI implemented a 'Bloom' filter as part of a set of tools called 'Project Giraffe', which detected and logged regurgitation of copyrighted content in model outputs shortly after the lawsuit was filed.
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Discovery of 78 million de-identified chat logs
The plaintiffs originally requested a sample of 120 million chat logs, but OpenAI negotiated it down to 20 million. When OpenAI finally submitted that sample in December 2025, the court deemed it 'unusable' due to excessive redactions. Moreover, the publishers accuse OpenAI of deleting billions of ChatGPT outputs after the lawsuit was filed, directly violating a preservation order. According to the motion, OpenAI made it intentionally difficult to access information it had already collected. 'If OpenAI genuinely believed that copying our clients' journalism was fair and legal, it wouldn't have hid the truth about having done it,' said Ian B. Crosby, lead counsel for the plaintiffs. For context on OpenAI's recent product launches, see OpenAI Launches GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna.
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Sanctions sought and OpenAI's defense
The New York Times and The Daily News are now asking the judge to sanction OpenAI for withholding evidence and manipulating the discovery process. Specifically, they request that the 20 million chat log sample be excluded as unreliable, that the court accept as fact that ChatGPT logs would show substantial regurgitation of their content, and that OpenAI be ordered to pay legal fees. OpenAI has denied the allegations, calling them 'blatantly false' and accusing the publishers of trying to invade user privacy. 'We'll continue defending our users' privacy and the long-established principles of fair use,' said OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri. This case highlights the broader legal challenges surrounding the use of copyrighted data to train AI models. For more on copyright law, see the Wikipedia entry on fair use.
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Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/09/new-york-times-says-openai-hid-evidence-in-chatgpt-copyright-trial
