Two more newspapers take OpenAI and Microsoft to court
The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, accusing both companies of copying their journalism without permission to build and operate AI products.
The complaint alleges that the companies scraped the newspapers’ websites — including articles behind paywalls — and folded the material into the datasets used to train and run ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI features, according to the Associated Press. The papers say the resulting products can reproduce passages from their reporting, closely paraphrase articles, and answer a reader’s question well enough that there is no longer a reason to open the site or buy a subscription.
That last claim is the commercially important one. Neither title is a national brand, and both are arguing that an assistant which summarises a story is a substitute for the story rather than a route to it.
What they are asking for
The two papers want the court to order the destruction of every copy of their copyrighted work held by the defendants, together with any training dataset or model that still contains it. It is the same remedy the New York Times asked for when it sued the same two companies in the same court in 2023, and it is the demand that makes these cases hard to settle quietly: a licence can be bought after the fact, a trained model cannot easily be unbuilt.
The Seattle Times said it spends millions of dollars a year producing its journalism and needs to protect that work from being used without consent or compensation.
The companies’ answers
OpenAI said its models are trained on publicly available data and that its practices are grounded in fair use — the argument it has run throughout the New York Times litigation. Microsoft said it was surprised by the suit, that it appreciates the importance of local journalism, and that it is “always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute.”
The Seattle Times filing is awkward for both defendants beyond the legal question. TechCrunch noted that Microsoft and OpenAI have previously funded journalism initiatives and fellowships at the paper that is now suing them — money intended to show the industry could be a partner to local news rather than a competitor for its readers.
A widening docket
The New York Times case has anchored AI copyright litigation in the Southern District since 2023, and it now sits alongside claims brought against Anthropic and Meta by other rightsholders. Two more newspapers joining does not change the legal question, which is whether training a model on copyrighted text is fair use. It changes the arithmetic around it: every new plaintiff adds another body of works and another argument that the harm falls on an industry rather than on one unusually large publisher.
Two things are worth watching. The first is whether the new complaint is marked as related to the existing New York Times case, which would put it on the same schedule and before the same judge. The second is whether other regional titles follow. Local publishers have so far mostly either signed licensing deals or stayed out of court entirely; Friday’s filing is the clearest sign yet that some of them have decided the deal on offer is not good enough.
