News publishers' summary-judgment brief alleges Microsoft sold OpenAI a copy of the Bing index and ran a secret crawler for it; OpenAI's extractors stripped copyright notices

What happened

On Oct. 16, 2026, the News plaintiffs (The New York Times, Daily News, The Intercept, the Center for Investigative Reporting, Ziff Davis) filed a 92-page redacted summary-judgment brief in the consolidated OpenAI copyright litigation, S.D.N.Y. No. 1:25-md-03143. It is a second updated public version of their Sept. 4 motion.

What the brief asks for

The plaintiffs ask the court to rule that OpenAI and Microsoft infringed their copyrights by acquiring, training on, grounding on, and trading their news articles; that fair use fails as a matter of law; and that OpenAI intentionally removed copyright management information (CMI).

Allegations in the brief

• From 2019 to 2022, Microsoft gave OpenAI a copy of the Bing search index under the code name "Project Taxi."
• Microsoft then built and ran a crawler for OpenAI under the code name "Project Mango," and told staff to keep it secret.
• An OpenAI researcher told co-founder Greg Brockman about "a hack to get around [the] nytimes paywall."
• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified that paywalled content should be licensed.
• OpenAI's text extractors removed copyright notices from over 99 percent of the asserted articles.
• What OpenAI paid for the index and the crawler, the number of pages crawled, and three full pages of the brief (pp. 6, 18, 86) remain redacted.

Output and grounding claims are pressed against Microsoft only, pending a sanctions motion against OpenAI.

These are the plaintiffs' characterizations; nothing has been decided by the court.