Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI Training Data
Two well-known US news publishers have taken OpenAI and Microsoft to court over copyright infringement, adding momentum to a wave of media lawsuits targeting AI companies. The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a joint complaint on September 4 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that both companies systematically scraped their journalism — including paywalled content — to train AI products without authorization or payment. The case matters because it tests whether the current US legal framework can protect news organizations from having their work absorbed into commercial AI systems.
The claim
The publishers say OpenAI and Microsoft used their articles to train ChatGPT, Copilot, and Bing's AI features, then allowed those tools to reproduce journalism verbatim — sometimes stripping copyright attribution in the process. They also allege the AI models occasionally generate false information and wrongly attribute it to named news organizations, compounding the reputational harm.
Beyond the content itself, the lawsuit targets the business impact. When readers get answers directly from an AI instead of clicking through to a news site, publishers lose traffic and the ad revenue that depends on it. The complaint seeks unspecified damages and, notably, the destruction of any training datasets that incorporate the publishers' work — a remedy that would have sweeping consequences for OpenAI and Microsoft if granted.
A growing legal pattern
This is not the first case of its kind. The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on the same grounds in 2023; that case is still ongoing, per TechCrunch. CNN has separately sued Perplexity, and Meta faces copyright claims across multiple jurisdictions. The pattern points to a genuine gap in US law: OpenAI argues that training on publicly available data qualifies as "fair use," but no court has yet issued a definitive ruling on that question.
Not every publisher has chosen litigation. The Associated Press and Vox Media negotiated licensing deals with OpenAI instead. Microsoft previously funded journalism projects at the Seattle Times — a fact that makes the lawsuit an awkward moment for the corporate-investment-as-partnership model both companies have promoted.
What comes next
The outcome of these cases could determine whether AI companies must license news content, pay retroactive damages, or restructure how they build training datasets. Until a court rules — or Congress acts — publishers are left choosing between lawsuits and deals, with no guarantee either route delivers lasting protection.
