Depositions Reveal OpenAI Staff Knew of Threat to Publishers, Court Documents Show

OpenAI executives and staff had knowledge that the company was harming publishers' business models through unauthorized content scraping, according to evidence revealed in the ongoing copyright lawsuit filed by the New York Times and other news organizations. In an April court deposition, Vinnie Monaco, OpenAI's data privacy engineer, disclosed that the company had performed internal searches for copyrighted news content before any lawsuits were even filed—contradicting claims OpenAI made to the court for over two years that such searches were technically unfeasible.