The Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft in a US federal court, accusing the technology companies of using their journalism without permission to train artificial intelligence systems. The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that the companies scraped content from the newspapers’ websites, including material protected by paywalls, and incorporated the articles into datasets used to train and operate AI products such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI features. The newspapers, based in Seattle and Long Island, New York, said the companies’ AI products can reproduce passages from their reports, closely paraphrase their articles and provide users with information that reduces the need to visit their websites or subscribe to their publications. “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 in a message to employees, according to the newspaper. An OpenAI spokesperson said the company’s models are trained on publicly available data and that their use of such material is protected by fair use. The spokesperson did not specifically comment on the lawsuit. Microsoft said it was surprised by the legal action but recognised the importance of local journalism and was willing to discuss possible solutions. The newspapers are seeking a court order requiring the destruction of copies of their copyrighted works, as well as training datasets or AI models that incorporate their content. The case echoes a lawsuit filed by The New York Times in 2023, which accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of its articles without permission to train OpenAI’s chatbot. That case remains ongoing. The latest lawsuit is among dozens filed by copyright holders against AI companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta over the alleged unauthorised use of their material to train AI systems.
Seattle Times, Newsday sue OpenAI, Microsoft over AI training
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