Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI, Microsoft Over Use of Their Journalism
Two more news organizations say ChatGPT and Copilot were trained on their reporting without permission or payment, joining a growing wave of publisher lawsuits.
What happened: The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the companies of training ChatGPT and Copilot on their journalism without consent or payment. The suit argues this could leave the news industry "broken beyond repair," comparing generative AI to "a snake eating its own tail" that risks destroying the very newsrooms whose work it depends on. It accuses the AI tools of being marketed as content creators when they actually consume human-written journalism and hand back copies or close imitations of it. The case is notable because Microsoft and OpenAI have previously funded some of The Seattle Times' own journalism projects and fellowships.
Why it matters: This isn't an isolated complaint. The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft back in 2023 over similar claims, and other publications have joined the fight since. Each new lawsuit adds pressure on courts to decide a question the industry can't settle on its own: whether training AI on copyrighted news reporting requires a license, and what happens to outlets that can't compete with free AI summaries built from their own work. For newsrooms already stretched thin, the financial stakes of losing readers to AI-generated answers are treated as existential, not theoretical.
How it works, plainly: The core complaint is straightforward: AI companies scraped or licensed large volumes of published articles to train chatbots, and those chatbots can now reproduce facts, phrasing, or near-copies of that reporting when users ask questions, without sending traffic or payment back to the original publisher. The publishers argue this turns their own investment in reporting into free fuel for a competing product. Microsoft told GeekWire it was "surprised" by the suit but remains open to discussing solutions, without addressing the specific accusations.
The rollout: This case now joins the broader stack of publisher litigation against OpenAI and Microsoft working through the courts, with no ruling yet on the central copyright questions. The involvement of The Seattle Times is an awkward wrinkle, since it has taken funding from the very companies it's now suing. How courts eventually rule could set precedent for whether AI companies must pay to license news content going forward, or whether current scraping-and-training practices stand as legal.