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Tuesday, December 1, 2026 · 174 days away
Countdown
NYT v. OpenAI Copyright Verdict Expected
Event overview
Expected verdict in The New York Times Company v. Microsoft and OpenAI in the SDNY — the bellwether copyright suit alleging that GPT-style models were trained on millions of Times articles — likely to set the legal floor for generative-AI training data and statutory damages.
Confirmation checklist
Source trail
Primary source
courtlistener.com
Last reviewed
2026-04-30
Tracker status
expected
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Expected single-date signal; useful for monitoring, but not strong enough for irreversible plans.
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Precise Event startDate schema is withheld so the page does not overstate an expected or windowed date.
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Weak-date handling
Expected verdict in The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation and OpenAI, the first major US copyright lawsuit over generative-AI training data to reach a jury. Filed on 27 December 2023 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York and consolidated with parallel actions from the Daily News, the Center for Investigative Reporting and the New York Daily News, the case is on track for a verdict around early December 2026 after a fall 2026 trial date set by Judge Sidney Stein.
The Times alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft copied millions of New York Times articles, archives and Wirecutter reviews — without licence and at industrial scale — to train GPT-3.5, GPT-4, GPT-4-Turbo, GPT-4o and successor models, and that ChatGPT and Bing Chat output near-verbatim regurgitations of paywalled Times content on demand. The complaint pleads:
OpenAI and Microsoft assert fair use under the four-factor test, arguing training is a transformative statistical process — not a substitutional copy — and that ChatGPT's output is, in normal use, paraphrased rather than verbatim.
A plaintiff verdict could expose OpenAI and Microsoft to statutory damages of up to $150,000 per wilfully infringed work — a number that, multiplied across the Times' archive, runs into the tens of billions. It would also rewrite the licensing economics for every frontier-model lab in the world. A defence verdict — or a finding of fair use — would crystallise training-on-the-open-web as a legally defensible practice and remove a structural overhang from AI valuations.
The judge has already denied OpenAI's motion to dismiss most claims and ordered preservation of training-data logs that OpenAI had been deleting on a rolling basis. Discovery has produced internal documents on data-scraping pipelines, model-evaluation benchmarks against Times content, and licensing negotiations OpenAI conducted with other publishers (Axel Springer, AP, FT, News Corp).
PACER docket 1:23-cv-11195. Reuters, Law360, Politico, the Times itself and the Verge cover hearings; recorded transcripts are filed within days. The New York Times has been reporting against its own legal interest, which has produced unusually candid contemporaneous coverage.
Pair with Musk v. Altman trial, the SAG-AFTRA contract expiry, the EU AI Act GPAI rules going live and the GPT-6 launch window.
When is the verdict expected? Around early December 2026, following a fall 2026 trial. Who is the judge? Judge Sidney H. Stein (SDNY). What is the maximum exposure? Statutory damages up to $150,000 per wilfully infringed work. What is the core defence? Fair use under 17 U.S.C. § 107 — that training is transformative and non-substitutional.
Date confidence
NYT v. OpenAI Copyright Verdict Expected has an expected date signal, but the source has not locked every detail. Treat the countdown as a monitoring aid and verify the linked source before making time-sensitive plans.
Source
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68117049/the-new-york-times-company-v-microsoft-corporation/Structured data posture
This page does not emit a precise Event startDate because the tracked record is expected or windowed. The countdown stays useful for monitoring, while schema avoids making a stronger claim than the source supports.
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Source reviewed Apr 30, 2026. The countdown record is intentionally labeled as scheduled or expected; use the source link and any range notes before treating the date as final.
Live values rendered at Jun 2, 10:32 AM UTC.
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