The Center for Investigative Reporting, Inc. v. OpenAI, Inc.

On 21 April 2025, the Center for Investigative Reporting v. OpenAI was transferred and consolidated into the multidistrict litigation (MDL), In re OpenAI Copyright Infringement, before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for coordinated pre-trial proceedings.

Filed on 27 June 2024, The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) v. OpenAI alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft copied and used tens of thousands of Mother Jones and Reveal articles without permission to train GPT models, including GPT-3 and GPT-4. CIR’s analysis found over 26,000 Mother Jones and 450 Reveal URLs in OpenAI’s training data, stripped of authorship, copyright, and terms-of-use information, in breach of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The complaint claims that ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot can reproduce (“regurgitate”) CIR’s copyrighted journalism, producing near-verbatim abridgements and detailed summaries when prompted. This, CIR argues, constitutes unauthorised copying, derivative works, and public display of its content. Microsoft is accused of contributing to the infringement by funding and powering OpenAI’s supercomputing infrastructure.

The suit includes direct and contributory copyright infringement and multiple DMCA violations, seeking damages and injunctions to protect investigative journalism from AI misuse.

This summary is provided for educational and research purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Allegations described are those made in the filings. Please consult the underlying source documents.