The Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the technology companies of using their journalism without permission to train artificial intelligence systems.
The newspapers filed the lawsuit on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that the companies scraped their websites, including content behind paywalls, and incorporated the material into datasets used to develop and operate AI products.
The lawsuit names products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and AI-powered features integrated into Bing.
The newspapers claim that the AI systems can reproduce portions of their articles, closely paraphrase their reporting and provide answers that reduce users’ need to visit their websites or purchase subscriptions.
The Seattle Times said its journalism represents a significant financial investment that should not be used by AI companies without permission or compensation.
“We feel strongly that we must defend our content — which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce — from being used without our consent or compensation,” Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote to employees, according to the newspaper.
OpenAI defended its approach, saying its models are trained using publicly available information and that its use of such material is protected by fair-use principles.
Microsoft said it was surprised by the lawsuit but acknowledged the importance of local journalism and expressed willingness to discuss potential solutions.
The newspapers are seeking an order requiring the companies to destroy copies of their copyrighted works, as well as training datasets and AI models that incorporate the disputed material.
The lawsuit adds to a growing wave of copyright litigation between media organisations and AI companies over the use of journalism and other copyrighted material in AI development.
The New York Times filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, accusing the companies of using millions of its articles without permission to train AI systems.
That case remains ongoing, alongside numerous other lawsuits brought by copyright holders against OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and other technology companies.
The disputes are increasingly putting pressure on the AI industry to establish clearer rules around the use of copyrighted content in model training and the commercialisation of AI-generated responses.
