OpenAI is facing calls for "serious sanctions" after fighting to keep news organizations from snooping through millions of logs to find evidence of users skirting their paywalls by prompting ChatGPT to regurgitate their articles.

This evidence is considered among the most important to both sides, potentially either dooming OpenAI as an infringer or exonerating its chatbot technology as a transformative fair use of news sites' content.

In a sanctions motion Thursday, news organizations suing OpenAI—led by The New York Times—accused the AI firm of repeatedly lying for years to conceal evidence of infringement that could hobble OpenAI's defense.

These alleged lies were exposed when the court compelled an “ill-prepared witness,” OpenAI privacy engineer Vincent Monaco, to be re-deposed. During the subsequent April deposition, he inadvertently revealed that OpenAI misled the court for two years about the cost and burdens of searching ChatGPT logs, NYT’s filing said.

Among the most shocking revelations, OpenAI allegedly pretended from the earliest stages of the case that it did not have the technical ability to search large anonymized samples of ChatGPT logs when it had actually already conducted such searches prior to the start of litigation, NYT alleged.

Sanctions are warranted because “OpenAI's concealment of this fact withheld highly relevant evidence, prolonged discovery, inflated expenses, and burdened the Court,” news plaintiffs alleged.

Asked for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson suggested that NYT's sanctions motion was a late litigation effort to access more logs and infringe more users' privacy. The spokesperson claimed that when the NYT recently dropped some claims in the lawsuit, it was a sign that news plaintiffs' case was crumbling, not OpenAI's defense.

"As the Times’ case weakens and they’ve been forced to drop claims against us, they’re persisting with their efforts to invade the privacy of people who have nothing to do with this case, including by making these blatantly false allegations," OpenAI's spokesperson said. "We'll continue defending our users’ privacy and the long-established principles of fair use.”

However, last month, NYT spokesperson Graham James disputed to Ars that news plaintiffs' case was weakened by dropping claims. He suggested instead the suit was streamlined and strengthened by adding claims against Microsoft. "Our core claims remain the same from the day we filed this lawsuit—that Microsoft and OpenAI stole millions of The Times’s copyrighted works to compete with our products and illegally enrich themselves,” James said.

OpenAI allegedly hid 80M log sample

Although the sanctions motion is heavily redacted, it’s alleged that Monaco testified that OpenAI had two large samples—spanning 10 million and 78 million logs—which had already been de-identified and could have been made available to news plaintiffs early on to maximize the discovery period.

“Not once did OpenAI disclose the existence” of those samples over two years, news plaintiffs alleged.

Even more frustrating to plaintiffs, OpenAI had already searched those samples for NYT content as part of its research into “creating a filter that could be used to block the regurgitation of copyrighted content,” the court filing said.

“OpenAI was willing and able to search its output logs—when it benefitted OpenAI,” NYT alleged, accusing the ChatGPT maker of “making the discovery process as burdensome as possible.”

Court says OpenAI sample is "unusable"

In a statement to Ars, NYT’s lead counsel, Ian Crosby, suggested that OpenAI obstructed access to logs and distorted evidence to shield its fair use claims.

“For over two years, OpenAI lied to The Times, The Daily News Plaintiffs, the public, and the court,” Crosby said. “It claimed searching ChatGPT outputs for copies of The Times’ and the Daily News Plaintiffs’ content was infeasible, burdensome, and invasive of users' privacy—while at the same time concealing that it had already done such searches. If OpenAI genuinely believed that copying our clients’ journalism was fair and legal, it wouldn’t have hid the truth about having done it.”

Instead of being transparent about the existing samples, OpenAI forced news plaintiffs to spend eight months searching in a “sandbox,” where they could only access a heavily redacted sample of 20 million logs. That sample was much smaller than the 120 million news logs plaintiffs originally requested, allegedly narrowed due to OpenAI’s “false representations regarding its existing technical capabilities” to search larger samples.

“This representation is belied by Mr. Monaco's testimony that OpenAI already had the ability” to search “large datasets, such as the more than 80 million output logs,” NYT alleged.

The 20 million log sample was further “skewed” when OpenAI used AI to make 19 billion redactions to the sample—so many that the court found the sample “unusable.”

Eventually, OpenAI removed some of the redactions, but “even then, a large number of redactions remain, including to News Plaintiffs’ domains, names, and other fields, which has hampered News Plaintiffs’ searches over the data,” NYT alleged.

Meanwhile, “the entire time that OpenAI was engaging in the improper over-redaction of this sample, it had in its possession a sample of 78 million conversations that had already been de-identified,” NYT alleged.

“OpenAI did not just oppose production of this evidence based on burden or relevance; it falsely represented to the Court that obtaining this evidence was beyond its capabilities without the expenditure of and months of work and that it would be just as easy for Plaintiffs to do this work—without disclosing that this work had already been done,” news plaintiffs alleged.

Similarly frustrating were dragged-out meet-and-confers over data searches that news plaintiffs claimed further limited discovery. For example, very close to discovery ending, OpenAI confusingly claimed that the 78 million log samples had been available for inspection for “over a year,” NYT alleged. However, “this makes no sense,” news plaintiffs argued, considering OpenAI’s very public fight to supposedly defend ChatGPT user privacy by blocking access to any logs beyond the 20 million sample.

“Either OpenAI unintentionally produced the dataset and it was so hidden in the training inspection data that even OpenAI did not realize it, or OpenAI knew it buried the dataset in a previous production, but hid that fact from the Court and News Plaintiffs for nearly two years—all the while vigorously arguing that turning over these logs would violate user privacy,” NYT argued.

Additionally, news plaintiffs accused OpenAI of other misconduct to obstruct access to evidence. Although the exact amount is redacted, OpenAI randomly deleted some parts of that limited 20 million sample, they alleged. And that's on top of allegedly deleting or compressing billions of logs that should have been preserved. According to NYT, OpenAI's witness testified that OpenAI simply "decided" that complying with the court's sweeping preservation order to retain all chats "would be hard; and thus took no steps to do so."

“There can be no question as to the wilfulness of OpenAI’s conduct, nor any excuse for its non-compliance. According to Mr. Monaco, OpenAI thought about complying with the Court’s Preservation Order, but then decided not to,” NYT alleged.

"Serious sanctions" necessary

News organizations claim that they do not request sanctions against OpenAI “lightly” but that the “severity” of OpenAI’s alleged misconduct requires sanctions to punish the AI firm and deter any other AI firms from following a similar playbook.

Requesting “severe” sanctions, news plaintiffs want the court to prohibit OpenAI from using the 20 million sample that it fought so hard for. They have further asked the court to find that withheld output logs included “substantial” “regurgitation of News Plaintiffs’ copyrighted material” and to block OpenAI from arguing otherwise. Finally, the jury would be instructed that OpenAI deleted billions of logs, which would play into news plaintiffs’ narrative that OpenAI has been moving in shady ways to obscure alleged substitution in the market since the case began.

“Lesser sanctions would not be effective,” news plaintiffs warned. In fact,“serious sanctions are especially appropriate," they said, because OpenAI’s misconduct “was knowing and intentional.”

If the court agrees that OpenAI’s misconduct was “egregious,” OpenAI’s attempt to constrict news organizations’ access to logs could end up being a fatal misstep in this intently watched copyright fight.

Whether training on copyrighted content is fair use will likely depend on whether news organizations can establish market harms, and OpenAI’s defense could be substantially set back if its massively redacted sample is rejected and if that makes it harder to argue substantial infringement did not occur.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Parents' attachment to screens and smartphones can have negative, long-lasting developmental and psychological effects on their children, according to new research. Caregivers who mismanage their devices can both exacerbate "insecure attachment" and make healthy relationships more anxious and avoidant for children, according to the findings, which were published last month in Frontiers in Psychology, a peer-reviewed journal. The study, which surveyed 600 minors in the US from 12 to 17 years old, found that kids reported feeling marginalized or neglected by parents glued to their screens. "A child with insecure attachment may lack confidence or display a lower sense of self; demonstrate difficulty with interpersonal relationships and intimacy; and possess an unwillingness to take risks necessary to achieve success," reports Bloomberg, citing one of the study's researchers. This type of behavior has become normalized: 2024 Pew data found that nearly half of U.S. teens say their parents are at least sometimes distracted by phones during interactions. "When parents were asked about their own behavior, far fewer said this was an issue," the report adds. "Still, earlier Pew data from 2020 found most parents feel their phones can interfere with quality family time, with 68% reporting being 'at least sometimes' distracted by them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The US Food and Drug Administration has rejected a legal petition demanding it set limits on toxic Pfas "forever chemicals" in food, marking another setback for public health advocates' push to limit exposures to the dangerous compounds. The agency is refusing to set limits despite a growing body of science and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finding food is the biggest source of Pfas exposure. Testing has found the levels of Pfas in single servings of some contaminated foods to be equivalent to drinking many glasses of contaminated water. While regulators have focused on reining in Pfas in water, the chemicals are widely used throughout the food system, and there was hope that the agency under Robert F Kennedy Jr would take the threat more seriously. Kennedy leads the "make America healthy again" (Maha) movement, of which eliminating toxic chemicals from food is a cornerstone. [...] The November 2023 petition called on the FDA to check for up to 30 Pfas compounds in a range of produce, fish, eggs, milk and bread. The agency did not respond within the six-month timeframe required by law, but TEJTF scaled back its petition in 2025 to ask the agency to set advisory thresholds for PFOA and Pfos, two of the most common and dangerous Pfas compounds, in seafood and milk. Recent FDA testing found 70% of seafood samples contain the chemicals, while independent milk testing found it in 12% of 50 samples, including extremely high levels in Whole Foods and Kirkland Signature brands. The FDA rejected the revised petition, stating it plans to take action on setting standards for Pfas, and there is "insufficient evidence to support [TEJTF's] request." The agency said it plans to set less non-binding "action levels" that do not require contaminated food to be removed from shelves. "Tolerance levels," or limits, make it illegal to sell food contaminated beyond a set threshold.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The opinion says whether it's fair is 'for our citizenry to decide at the ballot box.'

US manufacturers in many Rust Belt cities and towns are paying significantly higher electricity costs as growing energy demand from data centers strains the largest power grid operator in the United States. The resulting squeeze on profit margins for steelmakers and brick factories could further undermine President Donald Trump’s “Made in America” plan to revive US manufacturing, and it comes as Trump has simultaneously championed the tech companies behind the AI data center boom.

Factory electricity bills are generally rising faster than those for other business customers or residential customers, according to a Reuters analysis. It highlighted the example of the Belden Brick Company, a 141-year-old brick manufacturer in Ohio, whose electricity bills have soared from $1,600 to $12,000 per month due to a higher monthly capacity charge in the 13-state region served by the grid operator PJM Interconnection.

Meanwhile, the Steel Manufacturers Association warned that US steel companies concentrated in the Rust Belt region served by PJM Interconnection are paying tens of millions of dollars in higher power costs per year. Electricity accounts for 20 to 40 percent of the total production costs of making steel.

Each electric arc furnace used in steelmaking has an operating power load between 40 and 200 megawatts, and the entire US steel industry draws up to 11 gigawatts of power at peak production across all facilities.

US steelmakers have benefited from data center construction’s requirements for an estimated 1 million tons of steel per year. But data center energy demand has also driven up operating costs for the US steel industry, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Ohio-based steelmaker Metallus described its electricity costs as having jumped by 70 percent since 2024, leading the company to pay an extra $15 million in energy costs annually.

The higher electricity costs for manufacturers coincide with the attraction of large AI data center projects with substantial electricity needs to many states in PJM territory. That data center growth has driven up PJM’s capacity prices—paid to power generators according to supply-and-demand forecasts—from $28.92 per megawatt-day in 2024 to $329.17 per megawatt-day in 2026, according to Reuters' reporting.

PJM has also forecast that electricity demand in its territory will surpass available supply by 6.6 gigawatts starting in 2027, which The Wall Street Journal describes as equivalent to more than six nuclear power plants.

No easy fixes

Some US manufacturers have raised the prices paid by customers to partially offset their own rising electricity bills, or are even considering relocation of their businesses, Reuters reported. The Wall Street Journal highlighted warnings from steel industry executives that production outages could become more likely if local power grids are overwhelmed by demand. Such results would likely undercut the competitiveness and viability of US manufacturing, which the Trump administration claims to have prioritized despite the loss of 83,000 manufacturing jobs in Trump’s first year back in office.

The White House has touted getting Big Tech companies to pay for new power generation and transmission infrastructure by signing a Ratepayer Protection Pledge, which happens to lack any meaningful enforcement mechanism. The Trump administration also joined state governors in pushing PJM to hold a one-time backstop auction for purchasing new power supply capacity.

But the United States still faces huge challenges in building enough new power generation and transmission lines to support the energy needs of AI data center demand and US manufacturers, not to mention other businesses and residential customers. The Trump administration’s efforts to stop renewable energy projects involving wind and solar power have also not helped.

In 2025 alone, the United States saw the cancellation of power projects totaling 266 gigawatts of generation capacity—equivalent to 25 percent of America’s current electricity generation capacity and more than the total electricity generation of Texas, according to Michael Thomas, CEO of the Cleanview data platform that tracks renewable energy and data center projects. Clean energy projects accounted for 93 percent of those project cancellations.

The Trump administration’s cancellations of various wind power projects certainly represented one contributing factor. But other significant patterns included local opposition to renewable energy projects in states such as Ohio and Indiana that were also courting new data center development, along with a lack of new transmission lines, leading to high interconnection costs for new clean energy projects, Thomas said. If US states and the federal government are hoping to support local manufacturing, they may need to start making different choices in addressing the rising energy costs of the data center boom.

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A cybersecurity startup dangling millions of dollars to acquire zero-day security vulnerabilities in popular software is run by a pair of far-right conspiracy theorists and convicted felons whose most recent ventures included fake intelligence companies and a now-defunct AI-based lobbying platform they operated under assumed names.

The X/Twitter account IRIS C2 (@C2IRIS) has gained more than 4,000 followers since its creation in January 2025, posting frequently about security vulnerabilities, AI and software exploits. IRIS C2 says it is a company in McLean, Va. that sells offensive cybersecurity capabilities.

“Our business model is this,” reads a pinned post on top of the IRIS C2 account on X. “Attract the very best vulnerability researchers and exploit developers in the world to join our company. This mostly revolves around junior engineers with raw talent/extremely high IQ. We don’t care if they have a college degree/industry experience.”

The website linked in that profile — irisc2[.]com — says the company is hiring for a number of open positions, and a recent post on its LinkedIn page enthuses about an overwhelming number of applications from potential employees. The website claims IRIS C2 is in the business of acquiring “zero-day exploits, individual primitives, partial chains, and full capabilities across all major platforms. Payouts range from $10,000 to $7 million depending on target, reliability, and operational value.”

The government contracting portal g2exchange.com reports that irisc2[.]com is operated by a business based in Virginia called Calvexa Group LLC. The “contact” link on the website for Calvexa Group — calvexagroup[.]com — forwards visitors to irisc2[.]com. G2Exchange shows that while Calvexa Group LLC is registered as a federal contractor, it does not appear to be working on any direct government contracts.

A search on the Arlington, Va. address listed in the incorporation records for Calvexa Group LLC finds the property is occupied by Jack Burkman, the 60-year-old founder and managing partner of the lobbying firm Burkman & Associates. When approached with questions about IRIS C2, Burkman referred further inquiries to his longtime associate, 28-year-old Jacob Wohl.

Burkman and Wohl have a storied history of creating fake intelligence companies and using them to spread false claims about and frame public figures, including fabricated sexual assault claims against then FBI director Robert Mueller, and Pete Buttigieg, then mayor of South Bend, Indiana and a Democratic candidate for the presidency. In 2019, Burkman and Wohl held press conferences falsely alleging extramarital affairs by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and then-2020 presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, Wohl and Burkman were prosecuted by multiple U.S. states for making thousands of robocalls to residents of battleground states and disseminating false claims about mail-in ballots. They were indicted in Cleveland on 15 felony counts of orchestrating a robocall scheme aimed at suppressing the black vote in Detroit, and were sentenced in late 2025 to probation after their appeals to dismiss the charges were rejected.

In 2022, Wohl and Burkman both pleaded guilty to a single felony charge of telecommunications fraud in Ohio, and sentenced to a fine, probation, and community service. In March 2023, a judge in a New York civil case ruled that Wohl and Burkman had violated federal and state civil rights laws, and the two agreed to pay a $1 million settlement.

In June 2023, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) imposed a $5.1 million fine against Wohl and Burkman for their robocall campaigns, at the time the largest fine ever sought by the FCC under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

By the age of 17, Wohl had started multiple investment firms, and cultivated the nickname “Wohl of Wall Street” after appearing on Fox News in 2015 to discuss his new hedge funds. In 2017, the Arizona Corporation Commission charged Wohl and his investment funds with 14 counts of securities fraud, and ordered him to pay $35,000 in restitution. In 2019, Wohl pleaded guilty in California to four felony counts of selling unregistered securities and was sentenced to two years of probation.

The market for previously unknown security vulnerabilities has always been populated by a colorful mix of researchers, academics, charlatans, clout-chasers and people actively involved cybercrime communities. But the market for selling offensive security services to the U.S. government tends to be far more circumspect. Plenty of government contractors recruit vulnerability researchers and pay for the exclusive rights to novel software exploits, yet none of them do so quite as brazenly and openly as IRIS C2.

Indeed, KrebsOnSecurity was unaware of IRIS C2 until last month, when an attendee at a regional cybersecurity conference shared that Wohl and Calvexa Group were pestering people at the conference about selling their vulnerability research.

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Wohl said Mr. Burkman was not involved in the day-to-day operations of IRIS C2. Wohl shared that IRIS C2 originally began as a penetration testing company, but shifted its focus recently to selling phone-hacking services to the government. Several times throughout the interview, Mr. Wohl mentioned working on federal government contracts, but when pressed for specifics said he was not at liberty to speak publicly about them.

Mr. Wohl said he does not have any formal education or training in computer science or information security, and that most of his knowledge on the matter is self-taught.

“I know more about tech than anyone,” Wohl bragged. “My background has always been extremely technical, and I’ve always been deeply into tech. People know me as someone who is able to create spectacularly exquisite capabilities that would make your head spin.”

Wohl said security researchers bring the company unique vulnerability findings “on a regular basis,” but that in many cases those findings are preliminary and not fully fleshed-out.

“Let’s say someone finds a flaw in a media decoder on a phone,” Wohl said. “A lot of times what we receive is an exploit primitive, where the idea is there but the [execution] needs work. You need that exploit to be stable and reliable, and that’s what we do.”

Wohl claims IRIS C2 has approximately 40 employees, although he said none of them are allowed to list their employment on LinkedIn for operational security reasons. In May, the author of the IRIS C2 account on X said that his girlfriend had no idea what he did for a living. But if IRIS C2 has any other employees, they may be similarly unaware of Mr. Wohl’s history of outright fabrications — or even his real name.

In September 2024, Politico reported that Berkman and Wohl were bragging about big companies supposedly buying services from their now-defunct company LobbyMatic, which claimed to use artificial intelligence to assist in political lobbying efforts. However, Politico found the pair were running the company using pseudonyms, with Wohl reportedly adopting the name “Jay Klein” and Burkman using the moniker “Bill Sanders.” Politico reported that two of the former LobbyMatic employees resigned after learning of their true identities, while other employees only learned after they had left the company.