The New York Times Company booked $4.6m of pre-tax generative-AI litigation costs in the second quarter of 2026, against $3.5m in the same quarter of 2025, a rise of 32.6 per cent. For the half year the figures are $8.8m against $7.9m, up 12.1 per cent1. After tax the quarter's charge is $3.4m, or $0.02 a share2.
Both years sit inside the same filing, so no external comparison is needed to read the direction. The Times has carried Generative AI Litigation Costs as a discrete named special item since the first quarter of 2024, when it began pursuing its copyright claim over the use of its journalism to train generative models. Management carves the line out of adjusted operating profit as non-recurring, and both comparisons in the filing show it rising anyway.
That accounting choice does work of its own. No other major news publisher reports this as a named line rather than folding it into general and administrative costs, so the Times is building a public record of what defending the position costs while calling it exceptional. The record is useful in settlement talks and useful again when pricing any licence the company later agrees.
The $1.5bn Bartz v Anthropic class settlement set the headline number for what unlicensed training data costs at the end of a case. $4.6m a quarter is what one publisher pays to stay in the argument while it runs, and a smaller title weighing the same suit can now price that fight before filing one. The counter is procedural: legal costs climb as a case moves toward trial, so an accelerating line measures stage as much as escalation. This is the bill for the scraping era, not for anything the Times has deployed.
