Three months after the Supreme Court's Cox v. Sony ruling killed the knowledge-plus-contribution standard, The New York Times filed a proposed amended complaint that drops its contributory claim against OpenAI and recasts Microsoft as the principal architect, alleging a supercomputer purpose-built to infringe. Judge Sidney Stein now decides whether the new theory gets in the door the Supreme Court left open.
On March 25, 2026, the Supreme Court closed the door on the contributory infringement theory The New York Times had been running against OpenAI, holding in Cox Communications v. Sony Music that knowing about infringement is not enough to make a service provider pay for it. Three months later, on June 25, the Times filed a proposed amended complaint in the Southern District of New York that drops that claim against OpenAI and points the same conduct theory at Microsoft instead. The heavily redacted filing, as quoted by Bloomberg Law, alleges Microsoft built its training machine "for the purpose of using essentially the whole Internet," a corpus "curated to disproportionately feature Times Works," all "to train the most capable LLM in history." The system it describes runs more than 285,000 CPU cores and 10,000 GPUs. Microsoft's answer arrived fast, calling the move "a last-ditch effort by the plaintiff to save its claim from unfavorable precedent set in other recent rulings." Now Judge Sidney Stein decides whether the new theory gets in the door the Supreme Court left open.
The posture shift is the sharpest tactical pivot yet in the biggest AI copyright case in the country. The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on December 27, 2023. Judge Stein denied most of the motions to dismiss on March 26, 2025, and the core direct infringement claims have been marching toward trial ever since. What changed on June 25 is the secondary liability architecture. The contributory claim against OpenAI is gone. A trademark dilution claim went with it. In their place stands a single rebuilt inducement theory aimed at the company that owns the hardware.
The mechanism doing the work is the Cox holding itself. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for seven justices that a provider is contributorily liable only if it induced the infringement or supplied a service tailored for infringing use. Knowledge plus material contribution, the standard that had governed for decades, is dead. Cox won because internet access has substantial lawful uses. The Times read that opinion the way a trial lawyer reads a verdict form, and its proposed complaint is drafted to the new test line by line. It calls the Microsoft-built system an "unusually complex" machine, per Bloomberg Law's account of the filing. It alleges Microsoft supplied web scraping software and copyrighted works themselves, not just compute. Bloomberg Law described the accusation as Microsoft "providing the AI firm with a supercomputer platform specifically designed to infringe copyrighted works to train models." That is the tailored-for-infringement prong, pleaded in the Court's own vocabulary.
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Microsoft is the named actor whose position just changed. For two and a half years it sat in this case as the deep-pocketed partner behind OpenAI's conduct. The proposed complaint recasts it as the principal architect. Times spokesperson Graham James put the client's position on the record with MediaPost: "As we have long alleged, Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal our copyrighted works." Microsoft says the amendment is precedent-dodging. OpenAI, no longer facing the secondary claim, restated its standing position: "Our models empower innovation, are trained on publicly available data, and are grounded in fair use." All three statements are now part of the same record fight.
The tactical map explains why the Times narrowed its aim rather than widening it. Cox armor protects services with substantial lawful uses, and Azure at large plainly qualifies. So the Times shrank the accused "service" from Microsoft's cloud to one bespoke machine, allegedly purpose-built for a single customer and a single job. If the unit of analysis is that machine, the lawful-use shield thins. The redactions running through the filing signal that the purpose-built allegations rest on discovery material, not inference. This is what pleading to a three-month-old Supreme Court test looks like when the drafting lawyers move faster than the defense can brief it.
The next fight is procedural and it is already framed. The Times needs leave to amend, and that motion sits with Judge Stein. Microsoft can oppose on futility grounds, arguing the new theory fails the very precedent that forced the rewrite. That would put Cox's first real AI application in front of a district judge before any appellate court touches it. Or Microsoft can let the amendment in and save the purpose-built question for summary judgment, where the redacted discovery record comes out of the envelope. Either way the direct infringement claims keep moving. The amendment only decides who else stands next to OpenAI when they land.
The Southern District of New York keeps supplying this docket's turning points. It is the same courthouse where Judge Jed Rakoff pried open consumer-tier AI chats, and it now holds the first test of whether Cox v. Sony protects the companies that build AI infrastructure or exposes the ones that build it too precisely. The scoreboard on this case reads: filed December 27, 2023, survived dismissal March 26, 2025, amendment pending as of June 25, 2026. The door the Supreme Court closed stays closed. The live question is the one the Times just cut into Microsoft's wall. Stein holds the key.
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