Daily newspapers The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the companies of copying and using their copyrighted journalism without permission or compensation to train and operate generative AI products.
The lawsuit filed against the two companies in the US district court for the southern district of New York on September 4 has alleged that OpenAI and Microsoft systematically scrapped the publishers’ websites, including content protected by paywalls, and incorporated copies of their articles into datasets used to train and ground large language models.
“AI products like ChatGPT and CoPilot are touted as producers of content, but in fact they are rapacious consumers, devouring human-authored content and delivering back to the world copies and derivative imitations of that same original content they consumed to achieve their commercial objectives,” read an excerpt from the lawsuit.
In the lawsuit the news organizations have alleged that over less than three years, both the companies have built enormously lucrative generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) businesses by copying, without permission or compensation, vast quantities of copyrighted journalism, including their original, expressive work.
They have further alleged that the companies used datasets including WebText, WebText2, Common Crawl, and Microsoft’s Bing search index to train, fine-tune, and ground the large language models. The news organizations further mentioned copies of their content were retained by the models and could be reproduced in response to user prompts.
The complaint cites testing in which, according to the publishers, an OpenAI model reproduced 88 consecutive words from a Seattle Times article when prompted with the article’s headline and URL. The publishers also provide examples of Newsday articles which they say were reproduced or closely paraphrased by AI-generated responses.
They have argued that such use is not protected by the fair use doctrine, saying OpenAI and Microsoft’s products compete directly with news organisations by providing readers with information that could otherwise require them to visit publishers’ websites.
Meanwhile The Seattle Times union, which represents more than 160 employees, issued a statement, in which it has praised the company for taking this step, however, the union said that the company has refused to guarantee that no newsroom jobs will be replaced by AI.
The Seattle Times is suing OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement but still wants the right to replace my colleagues with AI pic.twitter.com/pu8kjoOc0E
— Heidi Groover (@heidigroover) September 5, 2026
The union has further highlighted that the company has instead agreed to protect reporters, ensuring that only humans, not AI will be used to interview sources or write stories.
It stressed that this will leave scores of other Seattle Times jobs unprotected, crucial to producing award-winning local journalism such as photographers, graphic artists, copy editors, producers and more.
In June OpenAI and Microsoft had also faced a lawsuit filed by 35 news publishers running over 400 newspapers in the US over alleged copyright violations involving scraping and copying thousands of their articles to train AI models like ChatGPT and Co-pilot.
The lawsuit had mentioned publishers like Richner Communications, AIM Media, Lakeway Publishers, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Inc, The New Mexican Inc.; Newspapers of Massachusetts, Inc.; Newspapers of New England, Inc.; Newspapers of New Hampshire, Inc.; North Country This Week, Inc.; The Ogden Newspapers, and others, who collectively own and operate nearly 400 local and regional newspaper outlets across the US.
The news publishers had argued that the two companies “secretly” scraped the content of these 400 newspapers including paywalled articles and that their rich earnings are not “fruits of their ingenuity alone.”
The New York Times became the first major news organization to take both the companies, and later Perplexity, to court over the use of its copyrighted articles to train AI models.
Also Read: 400 Newspapers Drag Microsoft and OpenAI to Court for “Stealing” Journalists’ Works
