According to Thurrott.com, U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona Wang has ruled that OpenAI must produce over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT chat logs to The New York Times. The ruling, dated November 7, 2025, is part of the high-profile copyright infringement lawsuit filed by the newspaper. The logs cover a sample from December 2022 through November 2024, which the Times argues is needed to prove OpenAI illegally used its content to train AI models. This order comes after the judge discovered OpenAI was deleting chat logs and directed the company to preserve them back on May 13, 2025. OpenAI objected to the request, citing burden and privacy, but the judge found the sample—less than 0.05% of the tens of billions of total logs—to be both relevant and proportional to the case, denying OpenAI’s motion for reconsideration.
OpenAI’s Log Problem
Here’s the thing: this isn’t just about turning over some data. The timeline here is damning. The judge ordered OpenAI to preserve logs after the lawsuit was filed because the company was actively deleting them. That’s a huge red flag in any legal proceeding. It immediately raises what the judge called “potential spoliation concerns”—fancy legal talk for maybe destroying evidence. So when OpenAI later came back with a privacy argument, it probably looked pretty bogus to the court. They were trying to shut the barn door after the horse was already in the next county. The core issue is that these output logs are the closest thing to a recipe book for how ChatGPT generates text. If the Times’ content is popping up verbatim or in a highly recognizable form in those logs, it’s a direct line to proving their copyright claims. OpenAI’s resistance makes you wonder what they’re so worried about finding.
Broader Implications For AI
This ruling sends a chill through the entire generative AI industry. It basically establishes that internal usage logs are fair game in copyright litigation. Every other company facing similar lawsuits—from Meta to Anthropic—is now on notice. Their own chat histories could be subpoenaed. This moves the battle from theoretical arguments about “fair use” in training data to a concrete, data-driven discovery phase. The judge’s point about proportionality is key, though. She didn’t ask for everything; she asked for a tiny statistical sample. That sets a precedent that might actually be manageable for tech companies, but it still opens the vault. The era of AI development being a black box, legally speaking, is over. The courts are now demanding to look inside, and that changes everything.
What Happens Next?
So what does the Times do with 20 million chat logs? They’ll be running sophisticated analysis to find matches with their copyrighted journalism. We’re talking about searching for specific phrases, article structures, and unique reporting. If they find a significant amount, it severely weakens OpenAI’s “fair use” defense. This case was already a bellwether. Now it’s becoming a detailed forensic audit. For the rest of us, it underscores a weird reality: every query we’ve ever typed into ChatGPT might become a legal exhibit. Not personally, in this anonymized case, but in aggregate. That’s a strange legacy for our casual prompts. The pressure on OpenAI to settle this case just went up exponentially, because no company wants its core product’s inner workings laid bare in a public courtroom.
