Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft for infringement
What's happening
The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement. The newspapers claim their content was used without permission to train the companies' artificial intelligence models.
Who's involved
The Seattle Times and Newsday are major regional newspapers suing OpenAI, an American AI company headquartered in San Francisco that develops generative pre-trained transformer models including ChatGPT, and Microsoft, a multinational technology company based in Redmond, Washington that is deeply invested in AI development and has partnerships with OpenAI.
Why it matters
This lawsuit represents a significant test case in the ongoing legal battle over whether AI companies must compensate or obtain permission from publishers whose content trains their models. The outcome could establish precedent for how news organizations, creative industries, and other content creators are compensated—or whether they have standing at all—in the AI era.
The story
Two major American newspapers have taken legal action against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that their published content was used to train artificial intelligence systems without permission or compensation. The Seattle Times and Newsday filed suit this week, joining a growing number of content creators and publishers challenging the practices of leading AI developers.
OpenAI, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence public benefit corporation, has built its business around large language models like GPT, which learn patterns from vast amounts of text data. Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the company's technology has catalyzed a broader AI boom, with ChatGPT becoming the fifth-most-visited website globally as of September 2026. Microsoft, the Redmond-based multinational technology giant and one of the world's most valuable companies, has become a major investor and partner in OpenAI's growth, integrating AI capabilities across its product suite.
According to The Verge, the newspapers argue that their copyrighted journalism was incorporated into these companies' training datasets without authorization, allowing the AI systems to generate content that potentially competes with or substitutes for their original reporting. The complaint raises fundamental questions about intellectual property rights in an era where machine learning requires enormous quantities of text to function effectively.
This case arrives amid a wave of similar litigation from publishers, authors, and content creators who contend that AI companies have built profitable businesses on the back of copyrighted work. News organizations in particular argue they face a double threat: their journalism trains systems that can generate news-like content, potentially cannibalizing their audience and revenue, while they receive no compensation for that training use.
OpenAI and Microsoft have previously argued that the use of published content for AI training falls under fair use doctrine, a legal principle that permits limited use of copyrighted material for transformative purposes. The companies maintain that their models do not reproduce substantial portions of the original works and serve a different function than journalism itself. How courts ultimately rule on these competing claims will reshape the economics of both AI development and content creation.