The move comes at a time when tech companies have continued to monetize AI language apps such as ChatGPT and Google Bard, which gained their capabilities through massive unauthorized scrapes of Internet data.

Further down, in section 4.1, the terms say that without NYT's prior written consent, no one may "use the Content for the development of any software program, including, but not limited to, training a machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) system."

Using a process called unsupervised learning, the web data was fed into neural networks, allowing AI models to gain a conceptual sense of language by analyzing the relationships between words.

The controversial nature of using scraped data to train AI models, which has not been fully resolved in US courts, has led to at least one lawsuit that accuses OpenAI of plagiarism due to the practice.

Last week, the Associated Press and several other news organizations published an open letter saying that "a legal framework must be developed to protect the content that powers AI applications," among other concerns.