NYT lawsuit forces OpenAI to preserve 20 million ChatGPT conversations

The US court has ordered OpenAI to indefinitely preserve 20 million ChatGPT conversations as part of the ongoing copyright lawsuit with The New York Times (NYT). 

The case marks a major legal test for how AI giants handle user data amid growing scrutiny over data usage and content rights.

Upheld by District Judge Sidney Stein, the preservation order overrides OpenAI’s usual 30-day data deletion policy. 

It applies to data collected between December 2022 and November 2024 from ChatGPT Free, Plus, Pro, and Team users, along with API customers lacking Zero Data Retention agreements. 

Notably, the directive excludes Enterprise, Edu, and ZDR clients.

In its statement, OpenAI confirmed that access to the preserved data is tightly restricted to a small legal and security team, and none of it will be used for model training. 

For those unversed, the NYT originally filed the lawsuit in December 2023, accusing OpenAI of using millions of its articles without permission to train AI models.

While OpenAI called the order technically inconsistent with privacy laws like GDPR, the judge ruled that the company’s terms allow such retention for legal purposes.

That said, the NYT case could reshape how ChatGPT and other AI platforms handle user data in future copyright disputes.