Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over Alleged Use of Their Reporting in AI Training

Two major U.S. newspapers, the Seattle Times and Newsday, have filed a federal lawsuit accusing OpenAI and its corporate partner Microsoft of copyright infringement. The complaint alleges that the AI developer harvested articles from the two outlets without permission and used them to train large language models that now generate text resembling the original reporting.

The plaintiffs contend that the AI systems routinely reproduce verbatim excerpts from their news stories, effectively republishing protected content without attribution or compensation. By integrating these articles into the training data, the defendants are said to have bypassed the newspapers' licensing agreements and ignored standard journalistic copyright safeguards.

OpenAI and Microsoft have faced a growing wave of litigation from media companies, content creators, and other rights holders who claim their works have been used to improve generative AI tools. Earlier this year, several publishers, including the Associated Press and the New York Times, announced similar legal actions, signaling a broader industry pushback against the practice of scraping publicly available text for model training.

Legal experts note that the case raises complex questions about the intersection of copyright law and machine learning. While U.S. law permits certain uses of copyrighted material for research and development under the doctrine of fair use, courts have yet to definitively rule on whether large-scale data scraping for commercial AI products falls within that exemption. The outcome could set a precedent that influences how AI firms source and compensate for the data that powers their models.

Both newspapers argue that the alleged infringement harms their business models, which rely on subscriptions and advertising revenue tied to original reporting. If AI tools can reproduce large portions of their articles, the plaintiffs claim that readers may obtain the same information without visiting the original sites, eroding traffic and diminishing the value of the newspapers' intellectual property.

The lawsuit seeks injunctive relief to halt further use of the newspapers' content in training and to obtain damages for past infringements. OpenAI and Microsoft have not publicly responded to the filing at the time of publication, but they have previously defended their data collection practices as lawful and essential for advancing AI capabilities. The case is expected to proceed through pre‑trial motions before potentially reaching a trial or settlement, a process that could take months or even years. In the meantime, the filing adds to mounting pressure on AI developers to negotiate licensing agreements with media organizations or to adopt more transparent data‑sourcing policies.