In a stunning misstep, OpenAI engineers accidentally erased critical evidence gathered by The New York Times and other major newspapers in their lawsuit over AI training data, according to a court filing Wednesday.

The newspapers’ legal teams had spent over 150 hours searching through OpenAI’s AI training data to find instances where their news articles were included, the filing claims. But it doesn’t explain how this mistake occurred or what precisely the data included. While the filing says OpenAI admitted to the error and tried to recover the data, what it managed to salvage was incomplete and unreliable — so what was recovered cannot help properly trace how the news organizations’ articles were used in building OpenAI’s AI models....

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