Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI, Microsoft over AI use of their articles
Two regional U.S. newspapers say ChatGPT, Copilot and Bing used their journalism, including subscriber-only stories, without payment or permission.
What happened: The Seattle Times and Long Island's Newsday filed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in federal court in Manhattan, Reuters reported on September 5. The two regional papers say their journalism, including articles behind paywalls, was used to build and run ChatGPT, Copilot and Bing without their authorization or any payment.
Why it matters: This isn't just about how AI models were trained years ago. The papers argue these tools now answer questions using their reporting directly inside a chatbot, so readers never need to click through to the original site. That threatens the subscription and advertising revenue that pays for the reporting in the first place, especially for local outlets with far thinner margins than national papers.
How it works, plainly: Large language models learn by processing huge volumes of text, and news articles are a valuable, information-dense source. Publishers say scraping that text, then letting the AI summarize or restate it for users, uses their work commercially without a license. OpenAI counters that it trains on publicly available information and that this falls under fair use. Microsoft says it was surprised by the suit but is open to talks.
The rollout: This adds to a growing pile of similar cases: The New York Times sued the same two companies in 2023, and that case is still pending, while other copyright owners have sued Anthropic and Meta. The Seattle Times and Newsday want more than money -- they're asking courts to order destruction of copied material and any datasets or models built from it, a remedy that could ripple far beyond these two newsrooms if granted.