New York Times Claims OpenAI Concealed Evidence of Copyright Infringement Detection Tools in Lawsuit

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.