It seems as if the court has forced OpenAI into collecting logs that they weren't otherwise collecting, or that they were deleting at user request.

So in this case not keeping logs as ordered by the court would be contempt of court.

Respectfully, it doesn’t matter the way it “seems,” it matters what is. They were collecting these logs, and as soon as they got the preservation order, they disabled deletion functionality and notified their customers of that.

There is a separate higher-tier private API customers can pay for that never had logging enabled, and the court did not force the company to add it.