IBM’s customers are mostly other businesses, and persuading those companies to use new A.I. products means assuring them that they won’t run into legal trouble. OpenAI, for example, has already been sued by a collection of authors who accuse it of infringing on their copyrights by using their books to train ChatGPT.

Over the last year, start-ups like OpenAI and other industry giants like Google and Microsoft have been much more aggressive than IBM about publicly discussing their A.I. work. Even Meta, the parent company of Facebook, this week introduced A.I. chatbots meant to sound like celebrities such as the quarterback Tom Brady and the hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg.

IBM’s relatively quiet stance showed how much the tech industry had changed in the 12 years since IBM’s Watson A.I. system beat top competitors on “Jeopardy!” A.I. became a centerpiece of IBM’s pitch to corporate customers, but the company has been overshadowed by younger competitors in the nearly yearlong A.I. frenzy in the tech industry.

Other technology suppliers are also trying to reassure customers by assuming legal risks. Microsoft pledged this month to defend customers in any copyright suits that arise from using its A.I.-powered Copilots, which it is adding to its office productivity software and programming tools. Adobe has made a similar commitment for copyright claims against customers using Adobe Firefly, its A.I. art-generation software.

The IBM A.I. systems — or “models,” as developers call them — are tailored for use by businesses. And the training data has been curated with companies in mind and culled from the internet, academic journals, computer code repositories, and legal and finance documents, the company said.