The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI in a New York federal court. The newspapers allege the tech companies unlawfully used hundreds of thousands of articles to train large language models. This training data included paywalled content used to power products like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. The suit claims these AI tools reproduce journalism verbatim, harming web traffic and subscription revenue.
This legal action follows similar copyright lawsuits filed by organizations such as The New York Times. The publications seek unspecified damages and the destruction of AI models that incorporate their copyrighted work. Microsoft expressed surprise at the filing but remains open to exploring potential solutions. OpenAI maintains that training models on publicly available data constitutes fair use.