OpenAI is trying to woo the public in its fight against the New York Times after losing court battle (www.businessinsider.com)

OpenAI has publicly attacked The New York Times for seeking 20 million ChatGPT user logs as part of the NYT’s copyright lawsuit, publishing a statement from CISO Dane Stuckey calling the demand an “invasion of user privacy.” That statement came after Magistrate Judge Ona Wang ruled on November 7 that OpenAI should produce the logs, saying existing safeguards — a protective order and OpenAI’s “exhaustive de‑identification” of the data — made production appropriate. OpenAI has asked the judge to reconsider, arguing the volume represents “forced production of a massive trove of irrelevant personal user conversations” and that the court relied on the wrong legal precedents. The dispute matters for AI/ML because it tests how far litigants can reach into model training data and user behavior logs in copyright suits — and whether de‑identification plus strict review procedures suffice to protect privacy and trade secrets. The court has already required extreme safeguards for reviewers (air‑gapped machines, no personal devices, guarded access with ID), yet the NYT says it needs log samples to analyze how users prompt and the model reproduces reporting. A ruling forcing broad log disclosure would set a precedent for discovery of telemetry and training‑adjacent data across AI companies; a win for OpenAI could reinforce limits on access and bolster reliance on de‑identification and protective orders.