Microsoft’s July 31, 2025 filing asked a federal magistrate judge to reject the news plaintiffs’ renewed request for discovery about “New Consumer Copilot.” Microsoft argued that the later consumer product was built on different infrastructure, code, logging, retrieval systems and personnel from the products originally described in the case. The filing sought to narrow the discovery process—not a ruling that consumer Copilot was cleared of copyright claims or removed from the lawsuit.
What Microsoft asked the court to do
Microsoft filed its response with Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang in the coordinated Southern District of New York proceedings known as In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation. The filing responded to a July 28, 2025 renewed letter motion by The New York Times, Daily News, Center for Investigative Reporting and other news plaintiffs.
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Microsoft asked the court to deny discovery specifically directed at New Consumer Copilot. Its filing is titled “Microsoft’s Response to News Plaintiffs’ ‘Renewed’ Letter Brief for Discovery on New Consumer Copilot.” The company argued that the request would expand the existing case beyond the products and conduct pleaded when the complaints were filed.
The Times filed its original complaint against Microsoft and OpenAI on December 27, 2023. The complaint and subsequent pleadings seek monetary and injunctive relief and assert copyright, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, unfair-competition and trademark-related theories. The Times alleges that Microsoft and OpenAI used its journalism without permission and that AI products could reproduce or summarize articles and reduce visits to the Times’s sites and applications. Those are allegations, not final findings.
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Microsoft’s filing is available in the court record at the July 31, 2025 response.
Microsoft’s technical and proportionality argument
Microsoft attributed several differences to New Consumer Copilot:
- It allegedly did not exist when the news plaintiffs filed their complaints.
- It allegedly used an entirely new infrastructure and system architecture and a different platform.
- It had a new code base, different logging systems and a different collection of logs.
- Microsoft said it was developed and marketed largely by a new group of employees, creating potentially hundreds of new custodians.
- Microsoft said its retrieval and grounding process did not use the earlier “Sydney Orchestrator.”
- The company also described differences in models and training-data configurations.
These are positions advanced in Microsoft’s filing, not technical findings independently adopted by the court. Microsoft also disputed that GPT-4o could simply be treated as an issue in the existing case and argued that later products or models could not be added through discovery alone.
The company framed the request as disproportionate in light of discovery already underway. Microsoft represented that the case had involved 260 requests for production, 35 interrogatories, 265 negotiated search terms, searches involving 33 custodians and more than 15 petabytes of output data. Those figures are Microsoft’s representations in its filing.
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The publishers argued that a product’s launch date should not end the inquiry if the product can show how Microsoft’s current systems retrieve, display or generate news material. They treated consumer Copilot as potentially relevant to several questions:
- Whether the assistant reproduces or summarizes protected articles, and under what conditions.
- How retrieval-augmented generation and newer models operate in a consumer-facing product.
- Whether the product’s behavior helps establish alleged effects on traffic, subscriptions, advertising or other publisher markets.
- How the newer system relates technologically and commercially to earlier Bing Chat and other products named in the pleadings.
The Times’s original complaint alleged that Bing Chat—later renamed Copilot—could produce verbatim or near-verbatim excerpts from Times articles and could substitute for visits to the publication. The complaint is an allegation and does not establish that every Copilot response behaved that way.
Consumer Copilot is not Microsoft 365 Copilot
“Copilot” is a family of products, not a single technical system. The principal categories in this dispute should be kept separate:
| Product or service | Role in the dispute |
|---|---|
| Consumer Copilot | The consumer-facing assistant at issue in the 2025 discovery fight. It was formerly associated with Bing Chat. |
| Bing Chat | The earlier name for Microsoft’s consumer chatbot; the Times complaint discussed it as part of the alleged conduct. |
| Microsoft 365 Copilot | Enterprise and productivity-oriented Copilot products referenced in the litigation, but not interchangeable with consumer Copilot. |
| Azure OpenAI Service | Microsoft’s cloud service for accessing OpenAI models, identified in the original complaint as part of the broader product ecosystem. |
| OpenAI models and ChatGPT | OpenAI products and models that form part of the claims against OpenAI and Microsoft; they are not automatically the same software or logs as consumer Copilot. |
Microsoft’s point was that shared branding or a common model relationship does not establish identical infrastructure, retrieval orchestration, logging or evidentiary relevance.
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Why this is a discovery dispute, not a copyright ruling
Discovery determines what evidence parties must search for and produce. It does not decide whether a work was copied, whether an output infringed, or whether a plaintiff is entitled to damages.
That distinction matters here. Consumer-Copilot output logs could show what a system returned to users, how often it surfaced publisher material or what users experienced. They would not, by themselves, establish what data was used to train a model. Likewise, retrieval from the web raises different factual and legal questions from training a model on copied works.
A product launched after a complaint is not automatically irrelevant. A court could find that later behavior bears on continuity, damages or current market effects. Conversely, technical changes may make evidence from the newer product costly and only weakly probative. The dispute is therefore about relevance, scope, burden and timing as well as technology.
The underlying copyright claims remain broader than chatbot outputs
The Times’s case concerns alleged use and commercialization of copyrighted journalism in generative-AI systems, not only isolated answers from a chatbot. The pleadings include theories involving direct, vicarious and contributory infringement, DMCA provisions, unfair competition by misappropriation and trademark dilution.
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On April 4, 2025, a federal court dismissed certain DMCA claims against Microsoft, including the Times’s section 1202(b)(1) claim, because the allegations did not sufficiently connect Microsoft to removal of copyright-management information. The opinion did not end the broader litigation. Read the April 4, 2025 opinion.
What happened after Microsoft’s filing
The consumer-Copilot issue remained active in later discovery. On January 5, 2026, the Times and other news plaintiffs filed a motion seeking approximately 8.1 million consumer Copilot output logs, formerly associated with Bing Chat. The docket describes output logs; it does not establish that these were all private conversations, that Microsoft produced them, or that a court ultimately ordered production.
The later filing shows why the July dispute mattered procedurally: limiting discovery at one stage did not make consumer Copilot disappear from the litigation record. The available materials do not verify a final public ruling resolving Microsoft’s specific July 2025 request. The January 2026 docket entry is available at Justia’s docket listing.
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Large-scale output discovery can contain prompts, generated answers, account information or incidental personal details. It can also expose internal retrieval and safety systems. Those concerns sit alongside the ordinary cost of collecting, reviewing and redacting data.
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The broader litigation has produced a separate public dispute over demands for user conversation data from OpenAI. OpenAI has said that court-ordered data was de-identified and placed under access controls; its account is at OpenAI’s public statement. That dispute should not be conflated with Microsoft’s consumer-Copilot motion. The common issue is how courts balance relevant evidence against user privacy and the burden of producing enormous datasets.
What the dispute could decide in practice
The court’s eventual treatment of consumer Copilot could influence how later products are handled in technology cases. The key questions include:
- How closely must a later product resemble the systems described in a complaint before its records become discoverable?
- Can current output behavior illuminate alleged harm from earlier products or training practices?
- What targeted sampling or technical evidence could answer those questions without reopening every request and custodian?
- How should judges weigh relevance against delay, expense, trade secrecy and the privacy of users whose data may be swept into discovery?
Whatever the eventual ruling, Microsoft’s July 2025 filing did not establish that consumer Copilot was outside the lawsuit. It established only that Microsoft asked to keep the newer product outside the existing discovery scope and argued that its technical and operational differences made the publishers’ request too broad.
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