News organizations ask judge to sanction OpenAI over alleged evidence destruction

A coalition of news organizations led by The New York Times asked a Manhattan federal judge on July 9, 2026, to sanction OpenAI, alleging the company hid and destroyed evidence in their copyright lawsuit.

The motion escalates a case first filed in late 2023 against OpenAI and Microsoft, which accuses the ChatGPT maker of training its models on copyrighted journalism without permission. The plaintiffs include the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune’s parent MediaNews Group, Ziff Davis and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

For more than two years, the filing alleges, OpenAI told the court it could not search its training datasets and ChatGPT output logs for copyrighted material. An OpenAI employee later testified in a deposition that the company had “performed multiple searches for News Plaintiffs’ content” even before the first plaintiff sued, according to the motion. The plaintiffs also allege OpenAI deleted billions of relevant ChatGPT conversations or made them unsearchable, and they are seeking penalties for the alleged destruction plus attorney fees to cover the cost of obtaining the withheld evidence.

The motion “asks the court to punish OpenAI for hiding and destroying evidence showing how ChatGPT was trained on stolen journalism,” said Steven Lieberman, an attorney for the New York Daily News.

OpenAI rejected the allegations. Drew Pusateri, an OpenAI spokesperson, called them “blatantly false” and said the Times was “persisting with their efforts to invade the privacy of people who have nothing to do with this case.”

The motion reflects one side’s account, and the judge has not ruled on it. A sanction for spoliation, if granted, could widen how much of OpenAI’s training process the plaintiffs get to examine before trial.