News Publishers Seek Sanctions Against OpenAI for Destroying Evidence

A coalition of 17 news organizations, including The New York Times and the New York Daily News, filed a motion in Manhattan federal court on July 9, 2026, seeking sanctions against OpenAI Inc. The publishers allege that OpenAI engaged in a "campaign of deception" by deleting billions of ChatGPT conversation logs in violation of preservation orders and falsely claiming for two years that it lacked the technical ability to search its training datasets for copyrighted content.

These allegations stem from an April deposition of OpenAI engineer Vinnie Monaco, who reportedly revealed the existence of "Project Giraffe," an internal operation designed to detect reproduced copyrighted text. Plaintiffs argue that OpenAI provided a heavily redacted and unusable sample of 20 million chat logs while withholding evidence of how the AI system used journalism for training. The publishers are requesting financial penalties and a court order establishing that ChatGPT systematically reproduced their work, which would limit OpenAI's fair use defense.

This legal battle is part of a broader copyright infringement suit involving OpenAI and Microsoft. A separate lawsuit filed on June 24 by Newspapers of New England and other publishers further alleges that the companies secretly crawled hundreds of websites and paywalls to steal copyrighted articles. OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri denied the misconduct allegations, characterizing them as "blatantly false" and asserting that the company's actions were intended to protect user privacy.