the nyt spent $28m suing openai for what it charged amazon $20m for

The New York Times has spent $28 million litigating against AI companies — $4.2 million in Q1 2026 alone. On July 9, it joined the Daily News, the Center for Investigative Reporting, The Intercept, and Ziff Davis in filing a 52-page sanctions motion accusing OpenAI of lying to the court: for two years, OpenAI claimed it couldn’t search its own training datasets or output logs. Then a February deposition of OpenAI’s privacy engineering lead revealed it could — and had, before the first lawsuit was even filed.

OpenAI called the allegations “blatantly false.” Naturally.

While the Times is deposing OpenAI executives about training data they allegedly hid, the Times is also collecting $20–25 million from Amazon for licensing its editorial content for AI training. Same content. Same use case. Amazon paid for it.

The Times also sues Perplexity. So the current position is: unauthorized use = lawsuit, authorized use = invoice.

That’s not hypocrisy. That’s price discovery. The $28M in litigation is the cost of proving that AI companies have to pay for journalism — and Amazon just confirmed what that costs. OpenAI and Perplexity can settle or lose. The sanctions motion just raised the price of losing.

The NYT didn’t start a copyright war. It started a licensing negotiation with extra steps.