Seattle Times and Newsday File Copyright Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Microsoft

Correction: The fourth bullet point has been revised to read “a spokesperson,” not “an spokesperson.”

According to a September 4 Reuters report, The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday in federal court, alleging that the companies copied the newspapers’ journalism without permission to train their AI systems.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, contends that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the newspapers’ websites, including content behind paywalls, and incorporated articles into datasets used to train and operate products such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI features.

The publications—headquartered in Seattle and Long Island, New York—assert that the AI systems can reproduce passages from their reporting, closely paraphrase articles, and provide users with answers that reduce the need to visit their websites or buy subscriptions.

“We feel strongly that we must defend our content—which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce—from being used without our consent or compensation,” Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote to employees, according to the newspaper.

A spokesperson for San Francisco-based OpenAI said the company’s models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use, without commenting specifically on the lawsuit.

A Microsoft spokesperson, based near Seattle in Washington state, said by email: “While we’re surprised by the lawsuit, we appreciate the importance of local journalism and we’re always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute.”

The Seattle Times and Newsday are seeking a court order requiring the destruction of copies of their works, as well as any training datasets or AI models that contain them.

The lawsuit echoes a case filed by the New York Times in 2023, which accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train OpenAI’s popular chatbot. That case is ongoing and is one of dozens brought by copyright holders against tech companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta over the alleged misuse of their material in AI training.