The New York Times doesn't have a lot faith in the quality of their own content. How on earth is ChatGPT going to go out into the world a do reporting from Gaza or Ukraine? How is it going to go to the presidents press conference and ask questions? ChatGPT cannot produce original content in the same way a newspaper can. The fact that the NYT seems to believe that ChatGPT can compete says a lot about how they write their articles or their lack of understanding of how LLMs work.
Now I do believe that OpenAI could at least have asked the newspapers before just scraping their content, but I think they knew that that would have undermined their business model, which tells you something about how tech companies work.