Seattle Times and Newsday File Copyright Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Microsoft
Two prominent American newspapers, the Seattle Times and Newsday, have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The suit was filed in a federal court in New York, accusing both technology companies of using the newspapers’ journalistic work without
The newspapers claim that content was scraped from their websites, including articles hidden behind paid subscriptions. This material was allegedly used to train and operate AI-powered features in ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing.
According to the lawsuit, the companies’ AI products can reproduce large portions of the newspapers’ reporting verbatim and closely paraphrase articles. As a result, readers receive answers that eliminate their need to visit the original websites or purchase subscriptions.
Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco, in a message to employees, wrote that the organization is committed to protecting its content, since millions of dollars are spent producing it each year, and it cannot be allowed to be used without consent or compensation.
A spokesperson for San Francisco-based OpenAI, without commenting directly on the lawsuit, said the company’s models are trained on publicly available data and are grounded in fair use. Microsoft, for its part, said it understands the importance of local journalism and remains open to discussing solutions to this kind of dispute.
The lawsuit follows a similar case filed by the New York Times in 2023, which accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of newspaper articles without authorization to train ChatGPT. That case remains ongoing and is one of dozens filed by copyright holders against tech companies — including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta — over alleged misuse of their material for AI training.