The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday, accusing the companies of using their journalism without permission to train and operate artificial intelligence products, Press Gazette reports.
Their lawsuit, filed Sept. 4 in federal court in New York, alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped articles from the papers’ websites, including stories behind paywalls, and incorporated them into datasets used for products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI features.
“This was not an easy decision,” Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco told employees. He said the newspaper spends millions of dollars a year producing the journalism at issue. A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was surprised by the lawsuit and was “always happy to sit down and explore solutions.”
OpenAI told Reuters in response to the case that its models are trained on publicly available data and that its practices are grounded in fair use. The company did not address the allegations in detail.
The filing joins a growing list of disputes between publishers and AI companies. Press Gazette’s running tracker of publisher AI deals and lawsuits documents publishers taking both approaches.
WikiHow sued OpenAI in August, alleging the company copied its instructional articles to train ChatGPT and create competing how-to answers. Argentina’s Editorial Perfil also sued OpenAI and Microsoft that month. Perfil says it believes it is the first Spanish-language publisher to bring such a case against the companies.
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Perplexity is facing its own challenges. A federal judge this summer allowed core claims in Reddit’s lawsuit against the AI search company and several data-scraping firms to proceed. CNN sued Perplexity in May, while The New York Times filed against the company in December, accusing it of using Times journalism without permission.
Perplexity responded, “You can’t copyright facts.”
Some publishers are pursuing both licensing and litigation. News Corp has agreements with OpenAI and Meta while suing Brave over scraped content. Its OpenAI agreement was reported at the time as potentially worth more than $250 million over five years, though the companies did not disclose the financial terms.
For publishers, the fight over AI is no longer a choice between signing a deal and filing a lawsuit. Increasingly, they are testing both routes at once as they try to define what their journalism is worth in an AI-driven market.
