The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of scraping the newspapers’ websites, including paywalled content, and using their articles in datasets to train and operate AI products such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI features.
The Seattle-based Seattle Times and Long Island-based Newsday said the companies’ AI tools can reproduce portions of their reporting, closely paraphrase articles and generate answers that may reduce users’ need to visit their websites or purchase subscriptions.
“We feel strongly that we must defend our content,” Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco told employees, arguing that the newspaper spends millions of dollars each year producing its journalism and should not have its work used without consent or compensation.
An OpenAI spokesperson said the company’s models are trained on publicly available data and rely on fair-use principles, but did not comment specifically on the lawsuit.
Microsoft, meanwhile, said it was surprised by the legal action but acknowledged the importance of local journalism and expressed willingness to discuss possible solutions to such disputes.
The two newspapers are seeking a court order requiring the destruction of copies of their copyrighted works, along with any training datasets or AI models that incorporate their content.
The case follows a similar lawsuit filed by The New York Times in 2023, which accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of its articles without permission to train OpenAI’s chatbot.
The dispute is part of a broader wave of copyright litigation against AI companies. Dozens of copyright holders have sued companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, alleging that their copyrighted material has been improperly used to train artificial intelligence systems.
