Seattle Times and Newsday Just Joined the Growing Line of Newspapers Suing OpenAI

The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a federal lawsuit Friday against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the two companies copied their journalism without permission or compensation to train AI systems including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing’s AI-powered search features.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, adds to growing legal challenges from news publishers accusing AI companies of building commercial products using unlicensed journalism.

What the Newspapers Are Actually Alleging

According to the complaint, OpenAI and Microsoft scraped both newspapers’ websites, deliberately capturing content sitting behind paywalls, and folded those articles into the datasets used to train and operate their AI products. 

The Seattle Times and Newsday, based in Seattle and Long Island respectively, argue the resulting AI systems don’t just learn from their reporting; they can reproduce specific passages verbatim and closely paraphrase entire articles when prompted.

This effectively gives readers a substitute for visiting the original site or paying for a subscription. 

Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco framed the stakes in direct terms, saying the paper must “defend our content from being used without our consent or compensation,” noting the millions of dollars the newsroom spends producing its reporting each year.

How OpenAI and Microsoft Responded

Neither company directly denied the scraping allegations, as Reuters reports. 

The report notes an OpenAI spokesperson said its models are trained on publicly available data and that its practices follow fair use, but did not address the specific claims in the lawsuit. 

According to Reuters, Microsoft said it was “surprised by the lawsuit” while remaining “always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute,” leaving room for a licensing settlement.

The newspapers are seeking more than damages. They want the court to order the destruction of their copyrighted work, training datasets, and AI models containing that material, a remedy that could be far more disruptive to OpenAI than a financial judgment.

Why This Case Fits a Pattern That’s Only Getting Bigger

This lawsuit is not breaking new legal ground; it reinforces an existing pattern. 

The Seattle Times and Newsday case closely resembles The New York Times’ 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, including the demand to destroy AI training data. It also adds to similar cases involving its rival lab Anthropic, Google, and Meta.

What stands out is that OpenAI is still relying on the same fair use defense nearly three years after The New York Times first challenged it. 

That suggests the company prefers fighting these cases individually rather than pursuing a broader licensing framework. 

But the strategy carries long-term risks; each new lawsuit could shape future court rulings and eventually leave OpenAI with fewer options. Microsoft’s more conciliatory response also suggests it may be feeling that pressure more strongly than OpenAI.

Source: Seattle Times, Newsday sue OpenAI, Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement