That's like saying that if a competitor can take your products from your warehouse and sell them for pennies on the dollar, your business has no value. The point is that, to some extent, OpenAI is selling access to NYT content for much cheaper than NYT, while paying exactly 0 to NYT for this content. Obviously, the NYT content costs the NYT more than 0 to produce, so they just can't compete on price with OpenAI, for their own content.
Note that I don't see any major problem if only articles that were, say, more than 5 or 10 years old were being used. I don't think the current length of copyright makes any sense. But there is a big difference from last year's archive vs today's news.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that OpenAI thought it had the rights to process the NYT articles and even display them in part, for the same reasons, fair use or otherwise, that Google can process articles and display snippets of same in its News product, and/or for the same reasons that Google can process books and display excerpts in its Books product. Just like Google in those cases, I would not be surprised to find Google/OpenAI on the receiving end of a lawsuit from rights holders claiming violations of their copyright or IP rights. However, I side with Google then and OpenAI now, as I find both use cases to be fair use, as the LinkedIn case has shown that scraping is fair use. NYT is crying foul because users/consumers of its content archive have derived unforeseen value from said archive and under fair use terms, so NYT has no way to compel OpenAI to negotiate a licensing deal under which they could extract value from OpenAI’s use of NYT data beyond the price paid by any other user of NYT content, whether it be unpaid fair use or fully paid use under license. It feels to me that NYT is engaging in both double-dipping and discriminatory pricing, because they can, and because they’re big mad that OpenAI is more successful than they are with less access to the same or even less NYT data.
Note that I don't see any major problem if only articles that were, say, more than 5 or 10 years old were being used. I don't think the current length of copyright makes any sense. But there is a big difference from last year's archive vs today's news.