OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says ChatGPT doesn't need New York Times data amid lawsuit

DAVOS, Switzerland — Sam Altman said he was "surprised" by The New York Times' lawsuit against his company, OpenAI, saying its artificial intelligence models didn't need to train on the news publisher's data.

Describing the legal action as a "strange thing," Altman said OpenAI had been in "productive negotiations" with the Times before news of the lawsuit came out. According to Altman, OpenAI wanted to pay the outlet "a lot of money to display their content" in ChatGPT, the firm's popular AI chatbot.

"We were as surprised as anybody else to read that they were suing us in the New York Times. That was sort of a strange thing," the OpenAI leader said on stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Thursday.

He added that he isn't that worried by the NYT lawsuit, and that a resolution with the publisher isn't a top priority for OpenAI.

"We are open to training [AI] on the New York Times, but it's not our priority," Altman said in front of a packed Davos crowd.

"We actually don't need to train on their data," he added. "I think this is something that people don't understand. Any one particular training source, it doesn't move the needle for us that much."

The New York Times sued both Microsoft and OpenAI late last year, accusing the companies of alleged copyright infringement through the use of its articles as training data for its AI models.

The NYT seeks to hold Microsoft and OpenAI accountable for "billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages" related to the "unlawful copying and use of The Times's uniquely valuable works."

In the suit, the NYT showed examples in which ChatGPT spewed out near-identical versions of NYT stories. OpenAI has disputed the NYT's allegations.

The legal action has ignited worries that