The artificial intelligence startup, OpenAI, is retaliating against The New York Times' lawsuit, claiming in a recent federal court filing that the Times employed an individual to "hack" OpenAI systems.

"The truth, which will come out in the course of this case, is that the Times paid someone to hack OpenAI's products," the legal team for OpenAI stated in a Monday federal court filing filed in Manhattan.

In its most recent submission, OpenAI requests that the court overseeing the main litigation dismiss all or a portion of the six counts the Times brought against the company.

The Times initially filed lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft in December, claiming that both businesses violated copyright laws by using Times stories to educate their AI chatbots to produce rival goods. However, in the motion filed on Monday, OpenAI's legal team stated that the Times's methods for getting the AI platform to display replies that seemed to be copied did not comply with its own "famously rigorous journalistic standards."

According to the suit, the Times not only paid someone to "hack" OpenAI's products, but it also used system manipulation to fabricate proof that supported its claims. It took them tens of thousands of attempts to produce the wildly unusual findings detailed in the Times' complaint.

According to OpenAI's attorneys in the petition, they were only able to do so by focusing on and taking advantage of a defect (which OpenAI has promised to fix) by utilizing misleading prompts that flagrantly break OpenAI's conditions of use. Even then, they had to give the program excerpts from the very papers they were trying to extract verbatim quotes from, almost all of which were previously available on several open-access websites. According to the filing, regular individuals do not utilize OpenAI's products in this manner.

OpenAI only implies that the media outlet paid a "agent" to produce "contrived attacks" against OpenAI's technology; it does not name the Times' "hired gun" or offer many specifics to support its allegation.

Further, according to OpenAI, the Times does not own the language or the facts that form the basis of how its platforms are educated. In recent months, other lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI and other tech businesses, including the one from The Times. Thousands of writers have joined together to sue the firm for copyright infringement, including George R. R. Martin, Sarah Silverman, John Grisham, and many more.