July 9 (Reuters) - A group of newspapers including the New York Times and New York Daily News asked a federal court in Manhattan ‌on Thursday to sanction OpenAI in their high-stakes copyright dispute for allegedly ‌lying to the court about its ability to search its systems for proof that it misused millions of ​their articles in AI training.

The newspapers told the court in a filing that OpenAI falsely told the court it could not search its large language models for their copyrighted material while hiding that it had done so "even before the first News Plaintiff filed suit."

The newspapers ‌said that OpenAI had also ⁠deleted billions of relevant ChatGPT conversations or made them unsearchable. They asked the court for sanctions, including attorneys' fees, and a court finding ⁠that OpenAI's chat logs showed that the company misused their copyrighted works.

Spokespeople for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the motion.

The lawsuit, first filed by the ​Times in ​2023, accused OpenAI and its largest financial ​backer Microsoft of using millions of ‌its articles without permission to train the large language model behind OpenAI's popular chatbot ChatGPT.

The case is one of many brought by copyright owners including authors, visual artists and music labels against tech companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms for allegedly misusing their material to train AI systems.

"For over two years, OpenAI lied to The Times, ‌The Daily News Plaintiffs, the public, and the ​court," the New York Times' lead attorney Ian Crosby ​said in a statement. "It claimed searching ​ChatGPT outputs for copies of The Times' and the Daily News ‌Plaintiffs' content was infeasible, burdensome, and invasive ​of users' privacy – while ​at the same time concealing that it had already done such searches."

OpenAI previously told the court that it did not have tools to search its datasets ​and output logs for copyrighted ‌material, but an OpenAI employee later testified that the company had "performed multiple ​searches for News Plaintiffs' content," according to the newspapers' Thursday filing.

(Reporting by Blake ​Brittain in Washington; edited by David Gaffen)