The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the Southern District of New York, alleging the companies extracted paywalled articles to train artificial intelligence systems. According to the complaint, the publishers’ content was incorporated into datasets used for ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and AI-powered Bing without authorization or compensation.
The news organizations claim the resulting chatbots can generate complete article passages and closely mirror journalists’ writing. The lawsuit seeks destruction of all copies of the material, along with any training datasets or AI models containing it. Seattle Times leadership stated the company must protect its content, which requires substantial annual investment to produce.
OpenAI maintains it uses only publicly available materials for training under fair use principles, while Microsoft expressed willingness to discuss potential solutions with publishers. These cases add to existing litigation involving the New York Times and other news organizations making similar copyright allegations against the AI firms.
The Trump administration recently filed a statement of interest supporting the tech companies, arguing that ruling against OpenAI and Microsoft would harm independent journalism and small news outlets while potentially disadvantaging U.S. AI development relative to international competitors.
Originally reported by Mashable →
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