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# The New York Times Spent $20 Million Fighting AI While Other Media Companies Watched
- URL: https://wire.fourthweb.ai/the-new-york-times-spent-20-million-fighting-ai-while-other-media-companies-watched/
- Published: 2026-07-28T10:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-28T11:35:39.000Z
- Description: While most media companies were still drafting their AI policies, the Gray Lady hired lawyers and went to war. The New York Times has spent over $20 million litigating its 2023 copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, with publisher A.G. Sulzberger signaling zero interest in settling.
- Author: Travis Wright
- Tags: AI Agent Economy, AI Agents, AI Infrastructure, OpenAI, Microsoft, IPO Watch

**While most media companies were still drafting their AI policies, the Gray Lady hired lawyers and went to war.**

### The Summary

- [The New York Times has spent over $20 million](https://www.wired.com/story/the-big-interview-podcast-a-g-sulzberger-new-york-times/?ref=wire.fourthweb.ai) litigating its 2023 copyright lawsuit against [OpenAI](https://wire.fourthweb.ai/tag/openai/) and [Microsoft](https://wire.fourthweb.ai/tag/microsoft/), with publisher A.G. Sulzberger signaling zero interest in settling.
- This isn't a David vs. Goliath story. It's a test case for whether intellectual property law means anything when your content becomes training data.
- The outcome determines if newsrooms get paid for what they make, or if "fair use" becomes a blanket excuse for tech companies to strip-mine the internet.

### The Signal

The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, claiming the companies [used millions of Times articles without permission](https://www.wired.com/story/the-big-interview-podcast-a-g-sulzberger-new-york-times/?ref=wire.fourthweb.ai) to train ChatGPT and other models. The complaint included side-by-side examples showing ChatGPT regurgitating Times articles nearly verbatim, complete with proprietary reporting and analysis. This wasn't about inspiration or transformation. It was copy-paste with extra steps.

Since then, the Times has burned through more than $20 million in legal fees. That's real money, even for a publication that added 300,000 digital subscribers last year. Sulzberger's position: this fight matters more than quarterly earnings. If AI companies can legally hoover up decades of journalism without compensation, the economic model for quality reporting collapses. Not slowly. Immediately.

> "This isn't a David vs. Goliath story. It's a test case for whether intellectual property law means anything when your content becomes training data."

OpenAI's defense leans hard on fair use doctrine, the same legal shield Google used to digitize millions of books in the 2000s. The argument: training an AI model is "transformative use" because the output isn't the input. You're not downloading a Times article. You're querying a model that learned patterns from millions of articles. Courts bought that logic for search engines. They might buy it for LLMs.

But there's a difference. Google showed you a snippet and sent you to the source. ChatGPT gives you the answer and keeps you in the chat. No click-through. No subscription revenue. No ad impressions. The Times argues this crosses the line from indexing to replacement.

**Key stakes for the industry:**

- If the Times wins, every AI company needs licensing deals with content owners. Training data becomes expensive, negotiated, tracked.
- If OpenAI wins, the legal precedent opens the floodgates. Any model can train on any public content, copyright be damned.
- Either way, the appeal process will stretch into 2027 or beyond. The industry moves faster than the courts.

Meanwhile, other publishers are watching and hedging. The Associated Press signed a licensing deal with OpenAI in 2023\. Axel Springer did the same in 2024\. Even Rupert Murdoch's News Corp cut a deal earlier this year. The calculus: take guaranteed revenue now rather than bet on a multi-year legal fight with uncertain odds.

The Times is betting different. They have the balance sheet to sustain a long fight and the editorial firewall to avoid conflicts of interest. If OpenAI needs Times-quality journalism to make ChatGPT credible, the leverage isn't one-sided. Sulzberger is calling that bluff.

### The Implication

If you're building in the agent space, watch this case. The legal framework for training data will shape what models you can build, what data you can use, and how much it costs. If courts side with publishers, expect licensing fees to become line items in your budget. If they side with OpenAI, expect a free-for-all and a race to scrape everything before someone changes the law.

For publishers and creators, the lesson is simpler: you either negotiate from strength now or accept pennies later. The Times chose strength. Most outlets don't have that luxury. What they do have is time to build leverage, technical barriers like paywalls that make scraping harder, and a growing awareness that the value of their IP just went up. The question isn't whether AI companies need quality content. It's whether they'll pay for it, or whether courts will let them take it for free.

### Sources

[Wired AI](https://www.wired.com/story/the-big-interview-podcast-a-g-sulzberger-new-york-times/?ref=wire.fourthweb.ai)