# Publishers Ask Judge to Sanction OpenAI Over Deleted ChatGPT Logs By Dana Docket · 2026-07-09 · Licensing & Legal · https://datacommenter.com/publishers-ask-judge-to-sanction-openai-over-deleted-chatgpt-logs/ Original reporting: [BNN Bloomberg](https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/artificial-intelligence/2026/07/09/news-outlets-urge-a-judge-to-sanction-openai-in-a-high-stakes-ai-copyright-fight/) _AI-assisted commentary, editorially reviewed. Quoted excerpts belong to the original outlet._ *The New York Times, the Daily News and other outlets say a deposition blunder exposed two years of false claims about OpenAI's ability to search training data — and they want a judge to punish the company for it.* For two years, OpenAI’s defense against the news industry’s biggest copyright case has rested partly on a technical claim: that searching its training data and ChatGPT output logs for copyrighted news content was infeasible, burdensome, and would invade user privacy. On Thursday, a coalition of publishers told a Manhattan federal judge that claim was false — and asked the court to sanction the company for it, according to [BNN Bloomberg](https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/artificial-intelligence/2026/07/09/news-outlets-urge-a-judge-to-sanction-openai-in-a-high-stakes-ai-copyright-fight/). ### the motion The 52-page filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, brought by the Times, the Daily News, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Intercept and Ziff Davis, accuses OpenAI of a pattern of obstruction rather than an isolated discovery dispute, as [Variety](https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/new-york-times-news-outlets-accuse-openai-of-lying-lawsuit-1236805648/) reported. “Instead of just producing that evidence at the start of the case and focusing on the merits of its fair use defense, OpenAI chose obstruction,” the outlets wrote, according to BNN Bloomberg. The plaintiffs say the truth surfaced only after OpenAI privacy-engineering lead Vinnie Monaco was compelled to sit for a second deposition — a redo ordered, per the [Daily News](https://www.nydailynews.com/2026/07/09/daily-news-seeks-serious-sanctions-against-openai-as-deception-alleged-in-copyright-lawsuit/), after Magistrate Judge Ona Wang found him “horribly unprepared” the first time around. In that second sitting, the outlets say, Monaco revealed OpenAI had already searched training datasets and output logs for copyrighted content despite claiming otherwise — and that the company had deleted logs in violation of the court’s preservation orders. Notably, the Daily News dates that revelatory deposition to April, while Variety attributes it to February — a discrepancy the dossier does not resolve. ### sharp words, both sides Attorney Steven Lieberman, who represents the Daily News and seven affiliated papers, did not soften the accusation: “For two years, OpenAI has been making misrepresentations to the court regarding its ability to search for Daily News content in its training datasets and output logs — key evidence concerning OpenAI’s theft of copyrighted content,” he said, according to the Daily News. “This motion asks the court to punish OpenAI for hiding and destroying evidence showing how ChatGPT was trained on stolen journalism.” Times lead attorney Rachel Crosby, a partner at Susman Godfrey, was similarly blunt in a statement to Variety: OpenAI “lied to The Times, The Daily News Plaintiffs, the public, and the court. It claimed searching ChatGPT outputs for copies of The Times’ and the Daily News Plaintiffs’ content was infeasible, burdensome, and invasive of users’ privacy – while at the same time concealing that it had already done such searches.” OpenAI, for its part, framed the motion as a privacy overreach dressed up as a discovery dispute. “As the Times’ case weakens and they’ve been forced to drop claims against us, they’re persisting with their efforts to invade the privacy of people who have nothing to do with this case, including by making these blatantly false allegations,” spokesperson Drew Pusateri said in a statement Thursday, per BNN Bloomberg. “We’ll continue defending our users’ privacy and the long-established principles of fair use.” ### the stakes for publishers The requested remedies go beyond a rap on the knuckles: the plaintiffs want attorneys’ fees tied to securing the “improperly withheld” evidence, special jury instructions informing jurors that OpenAI deleted billions of ChatGPT responses despite preservation orders, and whatever else the court deems fit, according to the Daily News. Lawyers for the outlets say they had to piece together more than 80 million ChatGPT user responses and other evidence tied to an internal OpenAI effort called Project Giraffe to get this far. The financial toll is already steep on the plaintiffs’ side alone: the Times has spent more than $28 million fighting AI companies in court, including $4.2 million in the first quarter of 2026, according to regulatory filings cited by Variety — costs that also cover a separate suit against Perplexity. ### a fair-use fight with company The case, filed by the Times against OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023 and since joined by the Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Ziff Davis and the Center for Investigative Reporting, tests a fair-use defense that tech companies are running in parallel across dozens of suits from authors, artists and record labels, per BNN Bloomberg. The results so far are mixed, but the financial exposure can be enormous: Anthropic agreed to pay book authors $1.5 billion for training Claude on pirated works, a settlement that BNN Bloomberg notes is still “a small fraction” of Anthropic’s $965 billion valuation as it prepares to go public. Unlike the authors’ cases, the Times has framed its claim around unfair competition — that OpenAI seeks to “free-ride on The Times’s massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment,” as stated in its amended complaint. ### what to watch The sanctions fight lands as the broader industry hedges its bets: a growing number of publishers have struck licensing deals with OpenAI, Google and Meta even as litigation grinds on, with the Associated Press the first to sign such an agreement with OpenAI in 2023. How Judge Wang rules on the sanctions motion — and whether jurors ultimately hear that OpenAI deleted preserved data — could shape not just damages in this case but the leverage publishers bring to future licensing negotiations. For data companies watching from adjacent industries, the episode is a pointed reminder that discovery conduct, not just the underlying fair-use theory, is becoming its own battleground in AI copyright litigation. > This motion asks the court to punish OpenAI for hiding and destroying evidence showing how ChatGPT was trained on stolen journalism. > — [BNN Bloomberg](https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/artificial-intelligence/2026/07/09/news-outlets-urge-a-judge-to-sanction-openai-in-a-high-stakes-ai-copyright-fight/) [Read the full story at BNN Bloomberg →](https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/artificial-intelligence/2026/07/09/news-outlets-urge-a-judge-to-sanction-openai-in-a-high-stakes-ai-copyright-fight/) --- Cite this analysis: https://datacommenter.com/publishers-ask-judge-to-sanction-openai-over-deleted-chatgpt-logs/ Cite primary facts: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/business/artificial-intelligence/2026/07/09/news-outlets-urge-a-judge-to-sanction-openai-in-a-high-stakes-ai-copyright-fight/ Need the underlying datasets (alt data, market data, AI training data)? 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