On 2026-09-04, The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on suspicion of copyright infringement.
The plaintiffs allege that both companies scraped content from their websites without authorization and incorporated it into datasets for the training and operation of products such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. According to the complaint, the companies have collected site information including content behind paywalls, reducing the need for readers to visit the original news sites or purchase subscriptions by having AI products reproduce article content verbatim or closely paraphrase it. They also claim that Copyright Management Information (CMI) has been intentionally removed.
In response, a spokesperson for OpenAI stated that the company's models are trained on publicly available data and fall within the scope of fair use, while declining to provide specific comments regarding the lawsuit. A spokesperson for Microsoft said that while they are surprised by the lawsuit, they understand the importance of local journalism and are willing to engage in discussions to resolve the dispute.
In addition to seeking an injunction against the copyright infringement, the plaintiffs are requesting the destruction of copies of the infringed works, as well as the datasets and AI models containing them.
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