A federal judge in Manhattan has ordered OpenAI to provide 20 million anonymised ChatGPT conversations as part of a copyright lawsuit filed by a major news outlet and other media organisations. The logs, drawn from consumer chats between December 2022 and November 2024, exclude business, enterprise and API interactions. The judge said OpenAI must remove all personally identifying information and submit the data within 7 days.
The ruling came after OpenAI raised privacy concerns, arguing that the vast majority of the logs, 99.99%—are unrelated to the case and could expose sensitive user information. OpenAI also cited the potential risk to user trust. The media organisations, however, said the logs are necessary to determine whether ChatGPT reproduced copyrighted material from their publications and to verify OpenAI’s claim that its system did not manipulate responses.
Judge Ona Wang stated that “there are multiple layers of protection in this case precisely because of the highly sensitive and private nature of much of the discovery.” Her comments followed OpenAI’s objection, where its spokesperson referred to an older blog post from the company’s security head, which argued that the demand for logs “disregards long standing privacy protections” and “breaks with common sense security practices.” OpenAI has appealed the judge’s order to the presiding judge, Sidney Stein.
OpenAI’s spokesperson reiterated that the request posed risks to user privacy and trust, while the media organisations maintained that access to the anonymised chats is essential to examine potential copyright infringement. The primary news outlet involved did not respond to a request for comment.
The case, originally filed in 2023, is part of a wider trend of copyright holders suing tech companies over the use of their content to train AI systems. Going forward, OpenAI must submit the anonymised logs while both sides prepare for further proceedings on how the data may be used in the litigation.
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