OpenAI appeals court order forcing it to preserve all ChatGPT data

OpenAI has appealed a court ruling from last month that forces it to retain ChatGPT data indefinitely as part of a copyright violation case brought by The New York Times in 2023. CEO Sam Altman said in a tweet on X that the judge’s decision “compromises our users’ privacy” and “sets a bad precedent.”

In May, federal judge Ona T. Wang ordered OpenAI to preserve and segregate all ChatGPT output log data that would otherwise be deleted due to a user request. She said that the ruling was justified because the volume of deleted conversations is “significant.” The directive notes that the judge asked OpenAI if there was a way to anonymize the data to address users’ privacy concerns.

The New York Times sought the order so that it can accurately track how often OpenAI violates its IP, including instances when users requested deletion of chats. A federal judge allowed the original case to proceed, agreeing with the NYT‘s argument that OpenAI and Microsoft‘s tech had induced users to plagiarize its materials.

In a FAQ on its site, OpenAI painted the order as a privacy issue without addressing the millions of alleged copyright violations. “This fundamentally conflicts with the privacy commitments we have made to our users,” the company wrote. “It abandons long-standing privacy norms and weakens privacy protections.” OpenAI noted that the order “does not impact ChatGPT Enterprise or ChatGPT Edu customers.”

The NYT and other AI copyright cases are still ongoing, as courts have not yet decided whether OpenAI, Google and other companies infringed copyrights on a massive scale by scraping material from the internet. The tech companies have argued that training is protected by “fair use” copyright law and that the lawsuits threaten the AI industry. Creators of that content, in turn, argue that AI harms their own livelihoods by stealing and reproducing works with little to no compensation.