Lawsuit tracker
CIR v. OpenAI
The Center for Investigative Reporting, Inc. v. OpenAI, Inc., et al. (S.D.N.Y.), consolidated with the newspaper cases and MDL No. 3143
| Plaintiffs | The Center for Investigative Reporting, publisher of Mother Jones and Reveal |
|---|---|
| Defendants | OpenAI entities and Microsoft |
| Court | U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Judge Sidney H. Stein) |
| Filed | 2024-06-27 |
| Status | Active |
| Content type | journalism |
| Last updated | 2026-07-21 |
The claims
Copyright infringement and DMCA copyright-management-information claims over the use of CIR’s journalism in training sets and in ChatGPT outputs.
What has happened
The nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting — publisher of Mother Jones and Reveal — sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging its stories were used to train ChatGPT without permission or compensation while other organizations pay to license the same material. Its complaint leaned on OpenAI’s own disclosures: a published list of top domains in the WebText training set showed motherjones.com at No. 267, with 16,793 distinct URLs ingested. The case was consolidated with the Times and Daily News suits before Judge Stein and now proceeds inside the OpenAI MDL. CIR joined the July 2026 sanctions motion over OpenAI’s discovery conduct.
Key developments
- 2024-06-27 — CIR files suit in the S.D.N.Y. — the first nonprofit investigative newsroom to sue OpenAI and Microsoft — citing OpenAI’s WebText domain list as evidence its sites were ingested.
- 2025-04 — The federal OpenAI copyright cases, CIR’s included, are centralized before Judge Stein; CIR shares the consolidated newspaper discovery track.
- 2026-07-09 — CIR joins the Times, Daily News, Intercept and Ziff Davis sanctions motion alleging OpenAI withheld and destroyed evidence. The motion is pending.
Why it matters for training data
Dataset manifests become evidence: OpenAI’s own published WebText listing did the plaintiff’s mapping for it. For suppliers, even a modest catalog can sustain years of federal litigation when works are registered and counsel takes the case on contingency — small newsroom does not mean small risk for the model builder.
Sources
- The Hill: news nonprofit sues OpenAI, Microsoft
- Nieman Lab: what it takes to sue OpenAI as a journalism nonprofit
- Loevy + Loevy (plaintiff’s counsel) case page
- Al Jazeera: OpenAI, Microsoft sued by news nonprofit
Deeper analysis
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