Copyright / Data

The New York Times and The Daily News have accused OpenAI of hiding evidence in their ongoing copyright lawsuit, alleging the company misrepresented its ability to search training data and chat logs. A court-ordered deposition of OpenAI data privacy engineer Vinnie Monaco allegedly revealed that OpenAI had already conducted internal searches of its training corpus for copyrighted journalism — and had amassed a database of roughly 78 million de-identified ChatGPT conversations to assess its own infringement exposure. OpenAI had previously argued that such searches were technically burdensome and privacy-sensitive.

Further compounding the allegations, the plaintiffs claim OpenAI built a "Bloom" filter under an internal initiative called "Project Giraffe" to detect and log output regurgitation shortly after the lawsuit was filed — then allegedly deleted billions of ChatGPT outputs in violation of a court preservation order, submitted a heavily redacted 20-million-log sample the court itself called "unusable," and substituted millions of logs in the requested sample. The NYT and Daily News are now asking the judge to sanction OpenAI, bar it from using the chat log sample as evidence, and compel it to pay legal fees. OpenAI denied the allegations, framing the move as a privacy attack on users by plaintiffs with a weakening case.

Anthropic has accused China's Alibaba of running a large-scale, covert operation to "distill" its Claude AI models without authorization. According to Anthropic, the effort involved roughly 25,000 fake accounts and 28.8 million exchanges with Claude, carried out between April and June 2026 — essentially using Claude's outputs at massive scale to train or improve a competing model.

Model distillation via fake accounts is a known risk in the AI industry, but the alleged scope here is striking: nearly 29 million exchanges over just a few months amounts to an industrial-grade extraction effort. Anthropic has not yet disclosed what legal or technical remedies it is pursuing.