For months, some of the biggest players in the U.S. media industry have been in confidential talks with OpenAI on a tricky issue: the price and terms of licensing their content to the artificial intelligence company.

The curtain on those negotiations was pulled back this week when The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging that the companies used its content without permission to build artificial intelligence products.

The Times said that before suing, it had been talking with the companies for months about a deal. And it was not alone. Other news organizations — including Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper company; News Corp, the owner of The Wall Street Journal; and IAC, the digital colossus behind The Daily Beast and the magazine publisher Dotdash Meredith — have been in talks with OpenAI, said three people familiar with the negotiations, who requested anonymity to discuss the confidential talks.

The News/Media Alliance, which represents more than 2,200 news organizations in North America, has also been talking with OpenAI about coming up with a framework for a deal that would suit its members, a person familiar with the talks said.

Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s biggest investor and is incorporating OpenAI’s technology into its products, has held talks as well. “We’ve had thoughtful conversations with a number of publishers, and look forward to future discussions,” said Frank Shaw, a spokesman for Microsoft.

Companies like OpenAI and Microsoft have sought licensing deals with news organizations to train A.I. systems that can produce humanlike prose. Those systems in turn power applications like chatbots, from which the companies can gain revenue.