New York Times Says OpenAI Erased Potential Lawsuit Evidence
WiredLawsuits are never exactly a lovefest, but the copyright fight between The New York Times and both OpenAI and Microsoft is getting especially contentious. This week, the Times alleged that OpenAI’s engineers inadvertently erased data the paper’s team spent more than 150 hours extracting as potential evidence. To disclose it, OpenAI created what the court is calling a “sandbox” of two “virtual machines” that the Times’ lawyers could sift through. In her declaration, Maisel said that OpenAI engineers had “erased” data organized by the Times’ team on one of these machines. But when the paper's lawyers looked at the “restored” data, it was too disorganized, forcing them “to recreate their work from scratch using significant person-hours and computer processing time,” several other Times lawyers said in a letter filed to the judge the same day as Maisel’s declaration.