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Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft over AI training use
The newspapers are asking the court to order destruction of their works and any training datasets or AI models that incorporate them.
The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a lawsuit in federal court against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the companies copied their journalism without permission to train AI systems. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, says OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the newspapers’ websites, including paywalled content, and incorporated articles into datasets used for products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing’s AI features.
The newspapers argue that their AI products can reproduce passages from their reporting, closely paraphrase articles, and provide answers that reduce the need for readers to visit their websites or maintain subscriptions. In a message to employees cited in the suit, Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco said the paper must defend content it produces at significant cost from being used without consent or compensation.
The outlet says OpenAI has responded that its models are trained on publicly available data and are grounded in fair use, according to a spokesperson, who did not comment specifically on the case. The lawsuit seeks a court order requiring the destruction of copies of the newspapers’ works and any training datasets or AI models incorporating them.
The filing also echoes a separate case filed by the New York Times in 2023 that accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of articles without permission to train OpenAI’s chatbot, which remains ongoing. The dispute is part of a broader set of copyright suits brought by rights holders against AI firms, including cases involving OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta.