OpenAI has announced its intention to challenge a court ruling that requires the company to indefinitely retain ChatGPT user data. This ruling was made as part of a lawsuit initiated by The New York Times.
This is reported by Business • Media
The New York Times Lawsuit and Court Demands
In November 2023, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of copyright infringement. The newspaper claims that its materials were used to train the large language model created by OpenAI. In February 2024, OpenAI issued a counter-accusation, asserting that The New York Times deliberately used specific prompts to obtain protected materials through ChatGPT in order to establish grounds for a lawsuit.
On May 13, 2025, Judge Vona T. Wang issued an order requiring OpenAI to “retain and isolate all log output data that would otherwise be deleted until further court order.” This decision was made based on a motion from The New York Times, which expressed concerns that OpenAI might delete potential evidence of its activities. It is believed that users can bypass restrictions through ChatGPT to obtain summaries of the newspaper’s articles, which became one of the plaintiff’s arguments.
OpenAI’s Position and Impact on Users
“This fundamentally contradicts the privacy commitments we have made to our users. […] We firmly believe that this is an overreach by The New York Times. We continue to challenge this ruling, prioritizing your trust and privacy,” stated OpenAI’s Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap.
The company emphasizes that the court’s decision affects the majority of users, except for subscribers of ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu, and those using the Zero Data Retention (ZDR) API. Notably, data will be subject to retention even in the event of forced deletion by the user. OpenAI has assured that it will keep users informed about further developments in this case.