U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang said in an order Friday that OpenAI has to hand over the ChatGPT logs in their entirety, saying such production was appropriate. The parties have been arguing for months over whether OpenAI must preserve the logs and ultimately turn them over. In June, U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein said OpenAI had to continue preserving the logs, over protests from the company, which said it presented privacy concerns for users.
Judge Wang said Friday that OpenAI had not shown how its customers' privacy rights are not adequately protected by existing court orders and OpenAI's "exhaustive de-identification of all 20 million" chat logs.
The claims are part of multidistrict litigation alleging that OpenAI made use of copyrighted material to train ChatGPT and that the AI model sometimes spits out verbatim or near-verbatim summaries of copyrighted works.
The claims from The New York Times Co., The Center for Investigative Reporting Inc. and eight regional newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital center on the use of their news content.
Counsel for OpenAI and the news outlets did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday.
The Times is represented by Genevieve Vose Wallace, Katherine M. Peaslee, Davida Brook, Elisha Barron, Zachary B. Savage, Tamar Lusztig, Eudokia Spanos, Scarlett Collings, Emily K. Cronin and Alexander Frawley of Susman Godfrey LLP and Steven Lieberman, Jennifer B. Maisel and Kristen J. Logan of Rothwell Figg Ernst & Manbeck PC and in-house by Karen A. Chesley and Ian Crosby.
The Alden newspapers are represented by Steven Lieberman, Jennifer B. Maisel, Robert Parker, Jenny L. Colgate, Mark Rawls, Jeffrey A. Lindenbaum, Kristen J. Logan and Bryan B. Thompson of Rothwell Figg Ernst & Manbeck PC.
The Center for Investigative Reporting is represented by Jon Loevy, Michael Kanovitz, Stephen Stich Match, Matthew Topic, Thomas Kayes and Steven Art of Loevy & Loevy.
OpenAI is represented by Andrew F. Dawson, Robert A. Van Nest, R. James Slaughter, Paven Malhotra, Michelle S. Ybarra, Nicholas S. Goldberg, Thomas E. Gorman, Katie Lynn Joyce, Sarah Salomon, Christopher S. Sun, Andrew S. Bruns and Edward A. Bayley of Keker Van Nest & Peters LLP, Andrew M. Gass, Joseph R. Wetzel, Sarang V. Damle, Elana Nightingale Dawson, Michael David, Allison L. Stillman, Rachel R. Blitzer, Herman Yue and Luke A. Budiardjo of Latham & Watkins LLP and Joseph C. Gratz, Rose S. Lee, Andrew L. Perito, Carolyn Homer, Jocelyn Edith Greer, Eric K. Nikolaides and Emily C. Wood of Morrison Foerster LLP.
The case is In re: OpenAI Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, case number 1:25-md-03143, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
--Editing by Stephen Berg.
For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.
