OpenAI and Microsoft are facing another copyright lawsuit from news publishers, with The Seattle Times and Newsday accusing the companies of using their paywalled articles to train AI systems without permission.
The lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of New York and alleges that the companies scraped paywalled content and included it in training datasets used for ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and the new AI-powered Bing. The publishers claim the AI tools can reproduce entire passages and closely paraphrase journalists’ work.
The case adds to a growing legal fight over how AI companies obtain the vast amounts of copyrighted material needed to develop increasingly capable models.
Publishers say AI is using work they paid to produce
For The Seattle Times and Newsday, the dispute is about more than individual articles. The publishers argue that their reporting represents substantial investment and should not be absorbed into AI training systems without consent or compensation.
Seattle Times president and CEO Alan Fisco told employees that the newspaper felt strongly about defending content that it spends millions of dollars a year producing.
The publishers are seeking the destruction of existing copies of the allegedly used material, along with training datasets or AI models that incorporate it. If successful, such a demand could have implications well beyond these two newspapers, particularly for how AI companies handle copyrighted and paywalled material.
OpenAI, however, disputes the underlying premise. The company said it uses publicly available materials that it considers grounded in fair use for model training. Microsoft said it was surprised by the lawsuit but indicated that it was willing to explore solutions with the publishers.
For ordinary users, the case matters because AI-generated answers increasingly compete with the original sources that produce news and information. A ruling could influence what material AI assistants are allowed to learn from and potentially change how publishers make their work available to AI companies.
Another legal battle could shape the AI-news relationship
OpenAI and Microsoft are already involved in other copyright disputes, including an ongoing case involving The New York Times and other publishers. The Times has argued that AI products compete with news organisations by reproducing their work without sufficiently transforming it under fair-use protections.
The US Department of Justice recently filed a Statement of Interest in that case, arguing that siding with The New York Times could hurt local newsrooms and independent journalism. The DOJ also said AI could potentially help smaller publishers compete with larger news organisations.
That creates a complicated backdrop for the latest lawsuit: AI companies need huge datasets to improve their systems, while publishers want control and compensation for the journalism those systems consume.
The next step will be the legal proceedings in New York, where the court will have to consider the publishers’ claims and the companies’ fair-use arguments. For now, the dispute leaves one question hanging over the AI boom: who gets to decide how journalism becomes training data?
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