OpenAI is being accused of accidentally deleting crucial data during a lawsuit concerning the training of its AI models with copyrighted content. The company claims the deletion was due to a technical error.
According to the plaintiffs, they had spent over 150 hours reviewing data provided on virtual machines. However, on November 14, OpenAI engineers reportedly deleted all search data.
While OpenAI has largely succeeded in recovering the data, the restored files are not suitable for analysis due to the loss of folder structures and file names.
OpenAI's lawyers argue that the technical issue arose from a configuration change requested by the plaintiffs and assert that the company did not intentionally delete any evidence. They stated, “There is no reason to believe that any files were actually lost.”