OpenAI Fights Court Order to Hand Over 20 Million ChatGPT Logs
OpenAI has asked a federal judge in New York to overturn an order requiring the company to turn over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT chat logs as part of an ongoing copyright infringement lawsuit filed by The New York Times and other media outlets. The company argued that complying with the order would compromise user privacy by exposing personal conversations.
In its filing, OpenAI stated that “99.99% of the chat transcripts” have no relevance to the case, which alleges that ChatGPT used copyrighted material from news articles to train its models. The company warned that releasing such data would mean that anyone who used ChatGPT in the past three years could see their conversations handed over to the plaintiffs.
OpenAI Pushes Back on Copyright Claims
The New York Times and other publishers claim the chat logs are necessary to determine whether ChatGPT reproduced copyrighted content and to challenge OpenAI’s argument that the publications “hacked” the chatbot’s outputs to create false evidence.
Magistrate Judge Ona Wang, who issued the order, said that user privacy would remain protected under “exhaustive de-identification” measures and strict handling safeguards. OpenAI, however, maintains that the order could set a dangerous precedent for user data privacy, with the company’s Friday deadline approaching.
OpenAI Chief Information Security Officer Dane Stuckey reiterated the company’s stance in a blog post, arguing that sharing the logs would violate privacy and security protections and force the disclosure of millions of personal conversations unrelated to the lawsuit.
The case is one of several ongoing legal challenges targeting major AI companies accused of misusing copyrighted materials to train generative AI systems.
