Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over Copyright
The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in a New York federal court. The publishers accuse the tech giants of using copyrighted articles to train AI models without permission.
American newspapers The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement. The lawsuit, filed in a New York district court, claims the tech companies scraped their journalistic content without authorization to train and power artificial intelligence systems.
Allegations of Unauthorized Scraping
According to the complaint, the companies harvested content from the newspapers' websites, including paywalled articles, and integrated these materials into datasets used to train and operate AI models. This includes OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, and AI-powered features within the Bing search engine.
The publishers argue that these AI systems can reproduce excerpts of their reporting and rephrase articles in a nearly identical manner. They claim this reduces the need for users to visit their websites or purchase subscriptions.
Alan Fisco, President and CEO of The Seattle Times, stated:
"We spend millions of dollars each year to produce high-quality journalism, and we must protect our content from being used without consent or compensation."
Responses from Tech Giants
In response, OpenAI stated that its models are trained on publicly available information and that its practices are grounded in fair use principles.
Microsoft expressed surprise at the legal action, adding that it recognizes the critical importance of local journalism and remains willing to discuss potential solutions to resolve such disputes.
Growing Legal Pressure on AI Developers
This lawsuit is part of an escalating wave of legal challenges faced by AI developers over intellectual property:
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In December 2023, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging unauthorized use of its articles to train generative AI models.
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In September 2025, Anthropic, the creator of the Claude chatbot, reached a landmark $1.5 billion settlement with a group of authors who claimed their creative works were used to train AI models without consent.
