On December 27, 2023, The New York Times Company filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York against a set of OpenAI and Microsoft entities. The case is docketed as The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation, Case No. 1:23-cv-11195, assigned to Judge Sidney H. Stein. The court record classifies the nature of suit as 820 Copyright, placing the dispute squarely in copyright law.
The significance of the filing is that it moved the long-simmering question of AI training data out of public debate and into formal litigation by a major rights-holder. Until this point, much of the discussion about whether it is permissible to train models on copyrighted text scraped from the web had played out in commentary and smaller suits. A lawsuit brought by a publisher of The Times’s stature, against the two companies most associated with commercial large language models, raised the stakes considerably.
This entry states only what the court record itself establishes: that the case exists, who the parties are, where and when it was filed, and that it is a copyright matter. The underlying legal questions, including whether training on copyrighted material is permissible and how the case will be decided, remain contested and are matters for the court. The docket reflects an active, vigorously contested case with a long list of attorneys on both sides.
Why business readers should care: this case is a bellwether for whether and how companies can use copyrighted material to train AI systems. Its outcome could affect licensing costs, what data model providers are willing to disclose, and the legal exposure organizations take on when they build products on top of models trained on web-scraped content. Following the court record itself, rather than secondhand characterizations, is the most reliable way to track it.