The Intercept Media, Inc. v. OpenAI, Inc.

On 3 April 2025, The Intercept Media 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.

The Intercept Media, Inc. v. OpenAI is a copyright infringement action brought by The Intercept, a U.S.-based investigative news organisation, against OpenAI and Microsoft. The lawsuit alleges that defendants copied and used thousands of The Intercept’s copyright-protected news articles to train earlier versions of ChatGPT (up to GPT-4) using datasets such as WebText, WebText2, and Common Crawl — large-scale internet scrapes containing online journalism.

The complaint asserts that both OpenAI and Microsoft intentionally removed copyright management information (author, title, copyright notice, and terms of use) from The Intercept’s works when building and hosting these datasets, thereby violating U.S. copyright law. Microsoft is also alleged to have created and shared derivative versions of the datasets through its Azure data infrastructure and Bing Copilot systems.

The suit brings three claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for unlawful removal of copyright information (17 U.S.C. § 1202(b)(1) and (3)), seeking statutory damages of at least $2,500 per violation and disgorgement of profits.

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.