Seattle Times and Newsday file copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft
The two newspapers allege that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped content from their websites, including pay-walled material, and incorporated it into the datasets that power ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI features. They argue the AI outputs can reproduce or closely paraphrase their reporting, potentially reducing traffic and subscription revenue. The lawsuit seeks an order to destroy copies of the articles and any training data that contain them. Both companies responded with generic statements about fair use and openness to discuss a resolution.
In a complaint filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, one outlet and Newsday accuse OpenAI and Microsoft of illegally harvesting their journalism to train large-language-model systems. The plaintiffs say the tech firms scraped both public and pay-wall-protected pages, adding the material to the corpora used for ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI services. They contend that the AI can output passages that mirror their stories, thereby cutting into website visits and subscription sales.
The newspapers are asking the court to order the destruction of any copies of their work and the related training datasets or models. OpenAI’s spokesperson maintained that its models rely on publicly available data and fair-use principles, while Microsoft expressed surprise at the suit but said it values local journalism and is willing to discuss a solution. The case follows a similar lawsuit brought by one outlet in 2023 and joins a growing wave of copyright actions against AI developers.
Why it matters
The case could shape how AI companies use copyrighted news content and affect the future of journalism revenue.
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