Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI Training Copyright

The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a federal lawsuit on September 4, 2026, against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the tech companies engaged in unauthorized copyright infringement by using the newspapers' journalism to train their artificial intelligence systems. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, claims that the defendants systematically scraped content from the publishers' websites, including material protected by paywalls, to develop products such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing’s AI features.

The legal action highlights the growing tension between legacy media organizations and the developers of generative AI. The newspapers argue that these AI models not only consume their expensive-to-produce content without compensation but also threaten their long-term viability by generating substitutive responses that discourage users from visiting the original news websites. The plaintiffs are seeking financial damages and a court order requiring the destruction of any training datasets and AI models that incorporate their copyrighted work.

The lawsuit details a pattern of behavior where OpenAI and Microsoft allegedly bypassed technical barriers to harvest vast amounts of reporting. According to the complaint, the defendants scraped hundreds of thousands of articles from both the Seattle Times and Newsday. The filing provides specific evidence of this activity, including instances where ChatGPT reproduced lengthy passages of journalism verbatim. One notable example cited in the suit involves the chatbot generating an 88-word stretch of text from the Seattle Times’ Pulitzer-winning coverage of the Boeing 737 MAX crashes after being prompted with only the article’s headline and URL.

This practice, the newspapers contend, constitutes a direct violation of their terms of service and copyright protections. By incorporating this content into their training datasets, the companies have created tools that can closely paraphrase or replicate original reporting. The publishers argue that this capability effectively allows the AI to compete with the very news organizations that produced the source material, creating a cycle that threatens the sustainability of independent journalism.

The litigation is particularly notable given the existing financial and collaborative ties between the parties. Microsoft Philanthropies has previously underwritten specific journalism projects at the Seattle Times, and both the Seattle Times and Newsday were participants in a $10 million AI fellowship program funded jointly by Microsoft and OpenAI in 2024. Despite these connections, the newspaper maintains that it has consistently protected its editorial independence and intellectual property rights.

In a memo to employees, Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco explained the difficult nature of the decision to sue. “We feel strongly that we must defend our content — which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce — from being used without our consent or compensation,” Fisco stated. The lawsuit marks a significant escalation in the newspaper's stance, signaling that previous collaborative efforts have not resolved the fundamental dispute over the value and ownership of the content used to power modern AI systems.

This case joins a growing list of copyright lawsuits brought by media organizations against major AI developers, including the New York Times, the New York Daily News, Ziff Davis, and the Center for Investigative Reporting. These cases have been consolidated before U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein in Manhattan. As of early September 2026, both the publishers and the tech companies have moved for summary judgment in the consolidated proceedings, setting the stage for a critical judicial determination on the scope of fair use in AI training.

The legal battle has also drawn attention from the federal government. A recent U.S. Justice Department brief filed in the New York Times case sided with Microsoft and OpenAI, arguing that a ruling in favor of the publishers could stifle American AI development. Meanwhile, OpenAI has pursued a different strategy with other outlets, securing licensing deals with organizations such as The Associated Press, News Corp, and Axel Springer. Publicly disclosed terms for some of these partnerships have reached over $300 million, highlighting the significant financial stakes involved in the ongoing debate over AI content usage.

As the litigation proceeds, the outcome could set a definitive precedent for how AI companies source data for their models. Microsoft, in its response to the lawsuit, expressed surprise at the legal action while maintaining an openness to future discussions. “While we’re surprised by the lawsuit, we appreciate the importance of the Seattle Times to our region and we’re always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute,” a company spokesperson said in an email statement.

The resolution of this case will likely influence whether AI developers continue to rely on broad, unlicensed scraping or move toward a more standardized model of paid licensing agreements. For the Seattle Times and Newsday, the immediate goal remains the protection of their intellectual property and the establishment of a framework that ensures compensation for the high costs of professional journalism. The case remains ongoing, with no clear indication of whether a settlement or a court-ordered resolution will be reached in the near term.