Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI, Microsoft Over Copyright

Two American newspapers, The Seattle Times and Newsday, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the tech companies used their journalism without authorization to train artificial intelligence systems. The complaint was lodged in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The newspapers claim that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped content from their websites, including material behind paywalls, and incorporated it into datasets used to develop and operate products such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing's AI features. They further assert that these AI tools can reproduce passages from their reporting, closely paraphrase articles, and provide answers that diminish the need for readers to visit their sites or purchase subscriptions.

Alan Fisco, president and CEO of The Seattle Times, said in a message to employees that the paper must defend its content, which it spends millions of dollars annually to produce, from being used without consent or compensation.

OpenAI, based in San Francisco, responded that its models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use, without commenting specifically on the lawsuit. Microsoft, headquartered near Seattle, expressed surprise at the legal action but acknowledged the importance of local journalism and indicated a willingness to discuss solutions.

The plaintiffs are seeking a court order requiring the destruction of copies of their works, as well as any training datasets or AI models that incorporate them. This case echoes a similar lawsuit filed by The New York Times in 2023, which is still ongoing and is part of a broader wave of litigation by copyright holders against AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.