Fighting the New York Times’ invasion of user privacy

Source: OpenAI Date: 2025-11-12 URL: https://openai.com/index/fighting-nyt-user-privacy-invasion

Summary

OpenAI’s November 2025 legal and public statement responding to the New York Times’ lawsuit (filed December 2023), specifically addressing a procedural or discovery issue in which OpenAI alleged that the Times’ legal strategy involved accessing or exposing ChatGPT user data. The framing “invasion of user privacy” positioned OpenAI as a defender of its users against the Times’ litigation tactics, turning a copyright dispute into a privacy argument. This type of counterframing is a standard litigation communications move but was notable given OpenAI’s own complicated relationship with user data and training data provenance.

Implications

Copyright litigation as a public narrative battleground. The NYT lawsuit was the most prominent of the training data copyright cases against AI companies. Both sides communicated through press releases and blog posts as well as through courts. OpenAI’s “user privacy” framing attempted to shift the narrative from “OpenAI stole content” to “the Times is invading users’ privacy.”

Thread: Copyright and content licensing. Sits alongside the News Corp, Financial Times, Axios, Washington Post, and Time partnerships as the positive side of OpenAI’s content licensing strategy, with the NYT lawsuit as the adversarial side.

Watch: How the litigation proceeded and whether the specific user privacy invasion claim OpenAI raised influenced the court’s handling of discovery or the case’s eventual outcome.