OpenAI urged a federal judge in New York on Wednesday to overturn a court order directing the company to hand over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT chat records as part of an ongoing copyright lawsuit filed by The New York Times and other media organizations. The company argued that complying with the request would risk revealing sensitive user conversations and set a troubling precedent for user privacy.
In its filing, the AI firm maintained that producing the chat records would compromise confidential user data, emphasizing that nearly all of the requested material— “99.99%,” according to OpenAI has no connection to the copyright infringement claims at the center of the lawsuit.
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“To be clear: anyone in the world who has used ChatGPT in the past three years must now face the possibility that their personal conversations will be handed over to The Times to sift through at will in a speculative fishing expedition,” the company said in a court filing, as quoted by Reuters.
The media organizations countered that access to the chat logs is crucial to verify whether ChatGPT replicated their copyrighted material and to challenge OpenAI’s claim that they had “hacked” the chatbot to fabricate evidence. Their lawsuit contends that OpenAI unlawfully used their published articles to train ChatGPT, enabling it to generate responses derived from their work.
In her ruling ordering the disclosure of the chat logs, Magistrate Judge Ona Wang stated that user privacy would remain protected through OpenAI’s “exhaustive de-identification” process and other security measures. The judge has given the company until Friday to submit the requested transcripts.
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OpenAI’s Chief Information Security Officer, Dane Stuckey, reiterated the company’s stance in a blog post on Wednesday, warning that releasing the chat logs would breach privacy and security commitments. He wrote that the order would “force us to turn over tens of millions of highly personal conversations from people who have no connection to the Times’ baseless lawsuit.”
A spokesperson for The New York Times responded to OpenAI’s remarks, saying the company’s blog post “purposely misleads its users and omits the facts.”
“No ChatGPT user’s privacy is at risk,” the spokesperson said. “The court ordered OpenAI to provide a sample of chats, anonymized by OpenAI itself, under a legal protective order.”
The dispute is among several ongoing legal battles targeting major tech firms, accusing them of improperly using copyrighted material to train their artificial intelligence models.