OpenAI says New York Times 'paid someone to hack OpenAI's products' in federal court filing

• OpenAI alleged The New York Times hired someone to "hack" its platforms.
• The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement.

In response to The New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company is clapping back, saying in a new federal court filing that the Times hired someone to "hack" OpenAI platforms.

"The truth, which will come out in the course of this case, is that the Times paid someone to hack OpenAI's products," OpenAI's lawyers wrote in a motion filed in Manhattan federal court on Monday.

In its new filing, OpenAI is asking the judge in charge of the overarching lawsuit to dismiss, in full or in part, four of the six counts the Times leveled against OpenAI in its lawsuit.

The Times first sued OpenAI and Microsoft back in December, alleging that both companies illegally used Times articles to train their AI chatbots to create products that compete with them, amounting to copyright infringement.

For example, the Times alleged in its original complaint that OpenAI's GPT-4 spat out "near-verbatim copies" of Times articles when prompted.

But, OpenAI's attorneys wrote in Monday's motion that the way the Times got the AI platform to show seemingly plagiarized responses was not in line with its own "famously rigorous journalistic standards."

Not only did the Times pay someone to "hack" OpenAI's products, the filing alleges, but it also gamed the system to produce misleading evidence for the case.

"It took them tens of thousands of attempts to generate the highly anomalous results" outlined in the Times' complaint, OpenAI's filing says.

"They were able to do so only by targeting and exploiting a bug (which OpenAI has committed to addressing) by using deceptive prompts that blatantly violate OpenAI's terms of use," OpenAI's lawyers wrote in the filing. "And even then, they had to feed the tool portions of the very articles they sought to elicit verbatim passages of, virtually all of which already appear on multiple public websites."

"Normal people do not use OpenAI's products in this way," the filing continues.

OpenAI does not specifically name the Times' "hired gun," nor does it provide many details backing up its accusation — it merely suggests that the media company paid an "agent" to create "contrived attacks" against OpenAI's technology.

OpenAI goes on to argue that the Times does not have ownership of facts and language, which it says are at the core of what its platforms are being trained on.

The Times's lawsuit is just one of many suits that have been lodged against OpenAI and other tech companies in recent months. A number of writers, including George R. R. Martin, Sarah Silverman, John Grisham, and thousands of others have piled on to sue the company for copyright infringement.

Attorneys for The New York Times did not respond to BI's request for comment on the allegations.