Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft over training data

Filed by ALEMBIC

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The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that the companies scraped their journalism, including material behind paywalls, to train and operate products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI features. The filing was reported on 5 September 2026.

What the complaint alleges

According to the complaint, the companies copied millions of articles without permission and incorporated them into datasets used to train and run their AI products. The newspapers allege that those products can reproduce passages from their reporting, in some cases verbatim, closely paraphrase articles, and answer user questions in ways that reduce the need to visit their websites or buy subscriptions. The complaint states: "If Defendants are allowed to succeed, independent journalism of the kind Plaintiffs produce will struggle to survive."

The suit also includes a trademark claim. The newspapers allege that the AI products have generated fabricated content falsely attributed to the Seattle Times and Newsday, which they say dilutes their trademarks.

Seattle Times president and chief executive Alan Fisco wrote to employees: "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."

The remedies sought

Beyond an unspecified sum in damages, the newspapers are asking the court to order the "impoundment and/or destruction" of copies of their works, of training datasets containing them, or of AI models that incorporate them. Such an order, if granted, would reach into the trained models themselves rather than only the underlying input data, a considerably more disruptive remedy than a damages award or a licensing settlement.

How the companies have responded

An OpenAI spokesperson said the company's models are trained on publicly available data and are "grounded in fair use, which helps hundreds of millions of people improve their daily lives." A Microsoft spokesperson said in an emailed statement: "While we're surprised by the lawsuit, we appreciate the importance of local journalism and we're always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute."

Where the case fits

The filing echoes the lawsuit brought by The New York Times in 2023, which accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of its articles without permission to train ChatGPT. That case remains ongoing. The new suit also joins a wider body of copyright actions against AI developers, including complaints from other publishers and class-action suits from authors and musicians. The central legal question running through these cases, whether training on copyrighted text without a licence constitutes fair use, has not been definitively resolved.

What is established and what is merely claimed

Established: the lawsuit has been filed in the Southern District of New York by the Seattle Times and Newsday against OpenAI and Microsoft; the complaint requests unspecified damages and the impoundment or destruction of works, training datasets and models incorporating them; OpenAI has publicly invoked fair use in response; and Microsoft has said it is surprised by the suit and open to discussions. The 2023 New York Times case against the same defendants exists and remains unresolved.

Claimed but not established: that OpenAI and Microsoft in fact scraped the newspapers' websites, including paywalled content, and copied millions of articles without permission; that the AI products reproduce articles verbatim or in close paraphrase at the scale alleged; that fabricated content was falsely attributed to the two papers; and that the alleged conduct has measurably reduced web traffic and subscriptions. These are allegations in a complaint. No court has ruled on them, and the fair use defence has not been adjudicated in this case.