The New York Times is not letting its AI copyright fight fade quietly. On June 25, 2026, the Times filed a motion to amend its copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, this time zeroing in on a specific and damning allegation: that Microsoft didn’t just passively benefit from OpenAI’s use of copyrighted content, but actively encouraged it by building a custom supercomputing system designed to make that training possible at scale.

The original complaint was filed on December 27, 2023, making this one of the longer-running and most closely watched AI copyright cases in US legal history. The amended filing, submitted to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, arrives in heavily redacted form, but its intent is clear.

Why the Times is rewriting its complaint

The court recently sided with Cox Communications in a case where Sony attempted to hold Cox liable for music piracy occurring on its network. The court rejected that argument, establishing a tighter standard for contributory infringement. Under the new framework, plaintiffs can’t just show that a party knew infringement was happening. They have to prove that the party intentionally acted to induce the illegal conduct.

Recognizing that the legal landscape had shifted, the Times moved quickly to realign its complaint with the new standard. The amended filing reframes the Microsoft angle entirely, arguing that building a bespoke supercomputing infrastructure for OpenAI wasn’t a neutral act of tech partnership. It was, the Times alleges, an intentional move to enable the mass ingestion of copyrighted material.

The supercomputer at the center of it all

Microsoft’s supercomputing infrastructure, which the Times highlights as central to its contributory infringement theory, reportedly includes over 285,000 CPU cores and 10,000 GPUs. The Times argues that this infrastructure was not generic cloud compute that OpenAI happened to rent. It was a tailored system, built specifically to enable the kind of model training that, according to the complaint, consumed millions of Times articles without permission or payment.

Prior court rulings in this case have already preserved the core copyright claims while narrowing some of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act allegations.

What this means for the AI industry and investors

For investors in Microsoft, the amended complaint introduces a new layer of legal risk that goes beyond OpenAI’s liability. Microsoft has positioned its Azure cloud and its deep OpenAI partnership as central planks of its AI growth story. A finding that Azure’s supercomputing infrastructure was a tool for intentional copyright infringement would complicate that narrative considerably.

The next key moment in the case will be whether the court grants the Times’ motion to amend. If it does, Microsoft faces a significantly more targeted legal challenge than the one it has been defending against since 2023.