On June 25, 2026, The New York Times filed its response to OpenAI’s motion for judgment on the pleadings in The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation (S.D.N.Y., 1:23-cv-11195), attaching a proposed Third Amended Complaint with a redline showing the changes. The filing appears as docket entry 1415 with the amended complaint and redline as attachments.
The amendment restructures the case around the Supreme Court’s March 25, 2026 decision in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment, which narrowed contributory copyright liability to cases where a defendant induced infringement or provided a service tailored for infringement. According to the redlined complaint and contemporaneous legal press reporting, the Times dropped its contributory infringement claim against OpenAI over ChatGPT users’ conduct, which the Cox standard made much harder to sustain.
At the same time, the Times sharpened its allegations against Microsoft, contending that Microsoft actively enabled OpenAI’s infringement by providing a supercomputing platform built specifically for the kind of training that consumed millions of Times articles without permission or payment - a theory that maps onto the Cox court’s carve-out for services tailored to infringement.
The case, originally filed in December 2023, remains one of the most closely watched AI copyright suits, and the June 25, 2026 amendment shows how the Cox ruling is already reshaping how publishers plead secondary liability against AI companies and their infrastructure partners.