Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft over AI training
The newspapers allege OpenAI and Microsoft used their journalism without permission to train and operate AI products.
New York, United States. The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a federal lawsuit on Friday accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of copying their journalism without permission to train artificial intelligence systems.
The newspapers are seeking the destruction of copies of their work and of training datasets or AI models incorporating that material.
Allegations in lawsuit
The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the newspapers’ websites, including content behind paywalls.
According to the complaint, the companies incorporated articles into datasets used to train and operate products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI features.
The Seattle Times, based in Seattle, and Newsday, based on Long Island, New York, said the AI products can reproduce passages from their reporting, closely paraphrase articles and provide answers that reduce the need for users to visit their websites or purchase subscriptions.
Company responses
Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote to employees that the newspaper must defend content it spends millions of dollars annually to produce from use without consent or compensation, according to the newspaper.
A spokesperson for San Francisco-based OpenAI said its models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use, without commenting specifically on the lawsuit.
Microsoft, which is based near Seattle in Washington state, said it was surprised by the lawsuit but recognised the importance of local journalism and was willing to explore solutions to the dispute.
Related cases
The case echoes a lawsuit filed by the New York Times in 2023, which accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train OpenAI’s chatbot.
That case remains ongoing and is among dozens of lawsuits brought by copyright holders against technology companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta over the alleged misuse of material for AI training.
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