Seattle Times and Newsday Join Growing Wave of Lawsuits Against OpenAI and Microsoft
The Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging their journalism was used to train generative AI systems without permission. The case adds to a widening legal battle between publishers and AI companies over copyright, licensing, and the future economics of news.
The legal fight over how AI models are trained has widened again, with The Seattle Times and Newsday filing suit against OpenAI and Microsoft over the alleged use of their journalism in generative AI systems.
According to the complaint, the publishers argue that AI products such as ChatGPT and Copilot were built in part on copyrighted reporting and could undermine the news industry by reproducing or imitating the value created by original journalism. The lawsuit reportedly warns that the economics of news could be damaged if AI systems can absorb publishers’ work and return derivative outputs at scale.
Part of a broader publisher-AI conflict
The case is the latest in a series of lawsuits brought by media companies against AI developers. Since The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, publishers have increasingly tested in court whether model training on news content constitutes copyright infringement, fair use, or something in between.
These disputes are becoming one of the most important fault lines in the AI industry. At stake is not only potential liability for model developers, but also whether the next generation of AI products will depend on broad licensing deals with content owners.
Why this lawsuit stands out
The Seattle Times' involvement is especially notable because Microsoft and OpenAI have previously supported some of the organization’s journalism projects and fellowships. That makes the lawsuit more than a standard copyright complaint: it highlights the increasingly complex relationship between AI companies and the publishers whose work helps inform digital ecosystems.
In a response cited by reports, Microsoft said it was surprised by the lawsuit but remained open to discussing solutions. That response reflects a wider industry pattern in which AI companies are simultaneously fighting some publishers in court while seeking licensing and partnership agreements with others.
The bigger question for AI and media
For the technology sector, these cases matter because they could shape the legal boundaries of AI training data. A ruling against AI companies could increase pressure to license high-quality content, redesign training pipelines, or limit the use of copyrighted material. A ruling in favor of AI developers could weaken publishers’ leverage and accelerate the use of scraped web content in commercial models.
For news organizations, the stakes are existential. Publishers argue that if AI systems can ingest expensive, human-produced reporting and then generate competing summaries or imitations, the business model for original journalism could erode further.
As more publishers join the courtroom battle, the conflict is moving beyond isolated disputes and toward a defining policy and business question for AI: who gets paid when machines learn from the open web’s most valuable content?