Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over Alleged Copyright Infringement

The Seattle Times and Newsday have taken OpenAI and Microsoft to federal court, accusing the technology companies of using their journalism without permission to build artificial intelligence systems.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the newspapers' websites, including material behind paywalls. The articles were then incorporated into datasets used to train and operate ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI features, the complaint says.

The newspapers contend that the products can reproduce passages from their reporting and closely paraphrase their articles. They also argue that AI-generated answers can reduce the need for users to visit their websites or purchase subscriptions.

The Seattle-based newspaper and Newsday, which is based on Long Island in New York, say the dispute concerns both the value of their reporting and how it reaches readers. Seattle Times President and CEO 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."

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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.