New York, Aug 17 (IANS): The New York Times is exploring legal options whether to sue Microsoft-backed OpenAI and protect the intellectual property rights associated with its reporting, the media reported.

The publication and OpenAI are in tense negotiations over reaching a licensing deal in which OpenAI would pay NYT for incorporating its stories in its artificial intelligence (AI) tools, NPR reported late on Wednesday.

However, the discussions “have become so contentious that the paper is now considering legal action”.

A lawsuit against OpenAI would set up the most high-profile legal battle yet over copyright protection in the generative AI era.

The NYT recently updated its terms of service to prohibit using its content to train AI models.

OpenAI is already mired in other legal tussles.

Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, along with authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, have sued OpenAI and Mark Zuckerberg-owned Meta over dual claims of copyright infringement.

The lawsuits alleged that OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta's LLaMA (a set of large language models) were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing their works.

The lawsuit alleged that chatbot never bothered to "reproduce any of the copyright management information Plaintiffs included with their published works".

In a first major government investigation into Sam Altman-run OpenAI, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is probing the ChatGPT developer over user data collection and the publication of false information.

The FTC has sent a 20-page letter to OpenAI, probing whether it has “run afoul of consumer protection laws by putting personal reputations and data at risk”.