Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft over AI training on their journalism

The allegations

The suit, a 38-page complaint filed Friday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York (Case No. 1:26-cv-07644), says the companies scraped the newspapers' websites, including articles behind paywalls, and put the material into datasets used to train and operate ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI features. The papers, based in Seattle and Long Island, New York, say the products can reproduce passages from their reporting, closely paraphrase articles and give answers that reduce the need to visit their sites or buy subscriptions.

The complaint describes generative AI as "a snake eating its own tail" that could "destroy the very organizations" that produce the content it is trained on. It accuses the companies of bypassing technical access controls and ignoring machine-readable prohibitions such as robots.txt files that forbid AI crawlers.

False attribution

The papers say the systems invented information and pinned it on the Seattle Times and Newsday brands, and that copyright notices and metadata were stripped from copied content. The legal bases cited are the US Copyright Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Lanham Act for trademark dilution. As evidence, the publishers point to passages from their articles reproduced almost verbatim or very closely paraphrased.

Remedies sought

The papers seek an order requiring the seizure or destruction of copies of their works, the training datasets and any AI models built on them, plus an injunction against further use of their content. They seek damages in an amount yet to be determined.

The 47% traffic figure

The publishers cite a 47% decline in search referral traffic to medium-sized publishers between December 2024 and December 2025 as an economic measure of the harm, according to heise. They say it threatens subscription, advertising and licensing revenue.

Alan Fisco, president and CEO of The Seattle Times, wrote to employees that the paper must defend its content, which is being used "without our consent or compensation". He said the journalism costs millions of dollars a year to produce.

Earlier lawsuits

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 over millions of articles used without permission, and that case is ongoing. More than 400 newspapers have raised similar accusations, heise reported. In the New York Times proceedings, the US government has sided with OpenAI, arguing that training AI on protected content falls under fair use, for reasons including national security.

Microsoft and OpenAI have funded some of the Seattle Times' journalism projects and fellowships, according to TechCrunch. The suit is one of dozens brought by copyright holders against OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta.

Company responses

OpenAI said its models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use, without commenting specifically on the lawsuit. Microsoft said it was surprised by the lawsuit, appreciated the importance of local journalism and was willing to discuss solutions.