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Title: OpenAI appeals court order forcing it to preserve all ChatGPT data

Date: Fri, 06 Jun 2025 12:00:32 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-appeals-co...

OpenAI has appealed a court ruling from last month that forces it to retain
ChatGPT data indefinitely as part of a copyright violation case brought by
The New York Times in 2023. CEO Sam Altman said in a tweet on X that the
judge's decision "compromises our users' privacy" and "sets a bad precedent."


In May, federal judge Ona T. Wang ordered OpenAI to preserve and segregate
all ChatGPT output log data that would otherwise be deleted due to a user
request. She said that the ruling was justified because the volume of deleted
conversations is "significant." The directive notes that the judge asked
OpenAI if there was a way to anonymize the data to address users' privacy
concerns.

The New York Times sought the order so that it can accurately track how often
OpenAI violates its IP, including instances when users requested deletion of
chats. A federal judge allowed the original case to proceed, agreeing with
the NYT's argument that OpenAI and Microsoft's tech had induced users to
plagiarize its materials.

In a FAQ on its site, OpenAI painted the order as a privacy issue without
addressing the millions of alleged copyright violations. "This fundamentally
conflicts with the privacy commitments we have made to our users," the
company wrote. "It abandons long-standing privacy norms and weakens privacy
protections." OpenAI noted that the order "does not impact ChatGPT Enterprise
or ChatGPT Edu customers."

The NYT and other AI copyright cases are still ongoing, as courts have not
yet decided whether OpenAI, Google and other companies infringed copyrights
on a massive scale by scraping material from the internet. The tech companies
have argued that training is protected by "fair use" copyright law and that
the lawsuits threaten the AI industry. Creators of that content, in turn,
argue that AI harms their own livelihoods by stealing and reproducing works
with little to no compensation.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-appeals-co...
all-chatgpt-data-120032364.html?src=rss

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