NYT Court Filings Accuse OpenAI of Using Methods to Bypass Its Paywall

Newly unsealed court filings in The New York Times’ case against OpenAI detail internal discussions around scraping paywalled content.
According to the filings, OpenAI researcher Nick Ryder told President Greg Brockman about “a hack to get around nytimes paywall” while discussing efforts to scrape the site.
Brockman reportedly replied, “ah nice.”
The NYT argues that the exchange supports its claim that OpenAI used deceptive methods to access protected content.
The filings also include internal comments about the broader impact of AI on journalism and creative work.
A $MSFT executive reportedly described AI training as “the largest theft of labor in human history,” while OpenAI’s ChatGPT chief Nick Turley said AI products were “largely substitutive” and could become increasingly so as the technology improves.
The documents add another layer to the legal fight over how AI companies obtain training data, particularly when copyrighted or paywalled material is involved.
The case could have major implications for how frontier AI companies access, license and compensate publishers for content used in model development.