Full retraining is prohibitively expensive, especially if it has to be done for cases like this where NYT initially permitted automated processing through robot

Full retraining is prohibitively expensive, especially if it has to be done for cases like this where NYT initially permitted automated processing through robots.txt at the time of training but then changed their mind upon realizing the potential market in licensing content to developers. To my knowledge there also hasn't been any successful training of capable LLMs on just public domain data. Machine learning, including foundation models and web-scale pretraining, has widespread uncontroversially beneficial applications (defect detection, language translation, spam/DDoS filtering, agriculture/weather/logistics modelling, etc.). The federal government has invested billions in AI, and is desperately trying to prevent China from taking the lead. NYT aren't really in a position here to dig their heels in with "not our problem if our deletion demand makes training AI in the US infeasible" - they likely know that's not going to fly, and are instead using it to prompt negotiation for licensing their content.