The artificial intelligence company announced its intention to appeal the preservation order, which was issued last month as part of the New York Times’ copyright infringement case against OpenAI. The court ruling mandates that OpenAI preserve and segregate all output log data from its ChatGPT service.

The Times had requested the data preservation as part of its legal proceedings against OpenAI, which the newspaper alleges has used its copyrighted content to train its AI models without permission.

OpenAI argues that complying with the broad data preservation order would conflict with privacy commitments the company has made to its users.

The company contends that the court’s requirements could compromise user confidentiality and violate its stated privacy policies.

“We will fight any demand that compromises our users’ privacy; this is a core principle,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a post on X.”

The dispute highlights the tension between legal discovery requirements in high-stakes copyright litigation and technology companies’ privacy obligations to their users.

The case is also being closely watched as it could set precedents for how AI companies handle user data in future legal proceedings.

The New York Times filed its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI in December 2023, alleging that the company used millions of the newspaper’s articles to train its GPT models without authorisation or compensation.