OpenAI offers 20 million user chats in ChatGPT lawsuit. NYT wants 120 million.

OpenAI is preparing to raise what could be its final defense to stop The New York Times from digging through a spectacularly broad range of ChatGPT logs to hunt for any copyright-infringing outputs that could become the most damning evidence in the hotly watched case.

In a joint letter Thursday, both sides requested to hold a confidential settlement conference on August 7. Ars confirmed with the NYT's legal team that the conference is not about settling the case but instead was scheduled to settle one of the most disputed aspects of the case: news plaintiffs searching through millions of ChatGPT logs.

That means it's possible that this week, ChatGPT users will have a much clearer understanding of whether their private chats might be accessed in the lawsuit. In the meantime, OpenAI has broken down the "highly complex" process required to make deleted chats searchable in order to block the NYT's request for broader access.

Previously, OpenAI had vowed to stop what it deemed was the NYT's attempt to conduct "mass surveillance" of ChatGPT users. But ultimately, OpenAI lost its fight to keep news plaintiffs away from all ChatGPT logs.

After that loss, OpenAI appears to have pivoted and is now doing everything in its power to limit the number of logs accessed in the case—short of settling—as its customers fretted over serious privacy concerns. For the most vulnerable users, the lawsuit threatened to expose ChatGPT outputs from sensitive chats that OpenAI had previously promised would be deleted.

Most recently, OpenAI floated a compromise, asking the court to agree that news organizations didn't need to search all ChatGPT logs. The AI company cited the "only expert" who has so far weighed in on what could be a statistically relevant, appropriate sample size—computer science researcher Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick. He suggested that a sample of 20 million logs would be sufficient to determine how frequently ChatGPT users may be using the chatbot to regurgitate articles and circumvent news sites' paywalls.