Seattle Times, Newsday Sue OpenAI, Microsoft Over AI Training

WASHINGTON: (News Desk) – US news organizations The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a new lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the companies of using content from their websites to train artificial intelligence systems without permission or compensation.

The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that paywalled news articles were used to train products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and the AI-powered version of Bing.

The publishers claim the AI systems can reproduce entire passages from their reporting or generate responses that closely resemble their original articles. They are asking the court to require the companies to delete copies of the allegedly copyrighted material, as well as training data and AI models containing the content.

Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco said the newspaper spends millions of dollars each year producing its journalism and believes it must protect that work from unauthorized use.

OpenAI has maintained that it trains its models using publicly available information and considers such use protected by fair-use principles. Microsoft said it was surprised by the lawsuit but remained willing to engage with the publishers to explore possible solutions.

The latest case adds to a growing number of copyright disputes involving major technology companies and news organizations over the use of journalism to develop AI models.

OpenAI and Microsoft are already facing a separate legal battle with The New York Times and other publishers. The Times has argued that AI products can compete directly with news outlets by reproducing or closely summarizing their original reporting without sufficient transformation to qualify as fair use.

The legal dispute has also drawn attention from the Trump administration. Last week, the US Department of Justice submitted a Statement of Interest in the New York Times case, warning that a ruling against the AI companies could have wider consequences for local news organizations and independent journalism.

The Justice Department argued that artificial intelligence could provide smaller publishers with new tools to compete with larger media organizations. It further warned that restrictions resulting from the lawsuit could slow US AI development and potentially create national-security concerns by giving foreign competitors an advantage.