The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a joint lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the two artificial intelligence companies of using their copyrighted articles without permission to train AI models. The legal action, filed on Friday, targets the core practice of scraping news content to build generative AI systems. The two news organizations described the technology in their filing as a threat that could undermine the very outlets and material the models depend on.
In the lawsuit, the publishers allege that OpenAI and Microsoft systematically bypassed paywalls to collect their articles for model training. The news organizations claim this practice has damaged their business operations by offering users an AI-generated substitute for reporting, which in turn cuts into website traffic and digital advertising revenue. Additionally, the suit contends that the AI systems can produce hallucinations that incorrectly attribute false statements to the two news outlets, and that the companies stripped copyright management information from the articles they used.
The Seattle Times and Newsday are the latest entrants in a wave of litigation from the news industry against AI developers. The New York Times initiated this trend in 2023 with a similar complaint against the same two companies. More recently, CNN filed a copyright suit against Perplexity over its AI search tool. These cases reflect a broader split among publishers on how to handle AI’s use of their journalism.
Not all news organizations have chosen to fight in court. The Associated Press and Vox Media have instead entered into agreements with OpenAI, permitting the AI firm to train its models on their content. That partnership route offers a contrast to the confrontational approach taken by the Seattle Times, Newsday, and others. The outcome of these lawsuits could shape how future licensing deals and legal standards evolve for AI training data.
The lawsuit underscores a key concern for the American technology and media sectors: the balance between AI innovation and the protection of original reporting. For US news outlets, the case highlights the economic stakes of generative AI tools that can reproduce or summarize subscription-based journalism. The legal action from the Seattle Times and Newsday adds to the pressure on OpenAI and Microsoft to defend their data collection methods in court.
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