According to the lawsuit, which also names Microsoft as a defendant, the companies should be held liable for “billions of dollars” in damages.
ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) “learn” by analyzing vast amounts of data, which is frequently obtained online.
The BBC has sought feedback from OpenAI and Microsoft.
The lawsuit argues that “millions” of New York Times articles were used without authorization to make ChatGPT smarter, and that the tool is now competing with the newspaper as a reliable information source.
It claims that when queried about current events, ChatGPT would sometimes generate “verbatim excerpts” from New York Times stories, which are inaccessible without a subscription.
According to the lawsuit, this means that readers can access New York Times material without paying for it, which means the newspaper is losing subscription revenue as well as advertising clicks from visitors to its website.
It also cited the example of the Bing search engine, which uses ChatGPT to power some of its features, displaying results from a New York Times-owned website without linking to the article or including the referral links it uses to earn revenue.
Microsoft has poured over $10 billion (£7.8 billion) into OpenAI.
The lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan, discloses that the New York Times approached Microsoft and OpenAI in April in an attempt to reach “an amicable resolution” over its copyright.
