How we’re responding to The New York Times’ data demands in order to protect user privacy

OpenAI is pushing back against a court order tied to its ongoing legal fight with The New York Times, one that would require the company to hang onto consumer ChatGPT and API conversations indefinitely, rather than deleting them on the usual schedule. The order stems from the Times' copyright lawsuit, where lawyers apparently want a broad pool of user data preserved in case it turns out useful for the case.

OpenAI says this isn't a small technical ask. The company has built its products around specific data retention windows, deleting chats after certain periods unless a user opts to keep them, largely as a privacy safeguard. An indefinite hold order blows past that framework entirely, sweeping up conversations from millions of people who have nothing to do with the Times litigation and never agreed to have their prompts sitting in storage forever.

The company is framing its response as a fight over principle as much as logistics. OpenAI argues that retaining this volume of sensitive personal and business data creates real exposure: bigger attack surface for hackers, more data that could be subpoenaed in unrelated cases down the line, and a chilling effect on people who use ChatGPT for things they'd rather not have preserved on a server indefinitely. OpenAI says it's pushing to narrow the scope of what must be kept, arguing that the legal system's interest in evidence doesn't require vacuuming up unrelated user data at this scale.

This is playing out as one of the more consequential side-battles in the broader Times v. OpenAI copyright case, which itself is still grinding through discovery. But the data retention fight touches something bigger than the lawsuit's core question of whether training on news articles was fair use. It's a preview of how courts, plaintiffs, and AI companies are going to keep colliding over what user chat logs even are — private communications, discoverable business records, or something in between that nobody has fully worked out yet.