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T9 · audit-ledger · counterfactual
New York Times v. OpenAI & Microsoft
The New York Times filed a federal copyright suit alleging GPT-4 and Copilot were trained on millions of Times articles without a license, and that GPT-4 emits Times reporting near-verbatim in response to common prompts. The complaint pleads billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages.
Verdict shape that would have refuted
Tier T6+T8- Flow contract
- flow(license_class: copyrighted_news) ∉ flow(model_artifact); for_each(training_record) ∃ license_attestation
- Fixture that exercises this contract
- /examples-ai/11-copyrighted-text-in-training-summary/manifest.json
The 'frontier-llm-v4-training-corpus' fixture demonstrates the AI-Act Art. 53(1)(d) summary completeness contract — a publisher reaches training-corpus that is not declared in the published summary.
- Regulatory anchor
- EU AI Act Art. 53(1)(d); 17 USC §501; DMCA §1202
- Date the vault would have flagged
- 2022 — at training-pipeline-compile time, before GPT-4's December 2022 ingestion run
What broke instead
The training pipeline ingested URL-list-expanded web content without a per-source license tag flowing through to the model card. There was no compile-time check that 'license_class: copyrighted_news' could not reach 'model_artifact'. The case will turn on years of discovery to reconstruct what was actually in the corpus.
Public outcome · Unliquidated billions in statutory damages exposure; license-negotiation leverage permanently lost. A compile-time refutation would have named the offending shard and the missing license tag — auditable in a single regulator question.
Cross-references
- · /ai/incidents/nyt-v-openai-2023 — public story (journalism register)
- · /vault/registry — model whose deploy would have been gated on this contract
- · /vault/audit — read-only auditor view of the incident table
- · /vault/incident — index of all replays