Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI Training
News Summary
Two more American newsrooms have taken OpenAI and Microsoft to court. The Seattle Times and Newsday, the daily paper serving Long Island, New York, filed a federal lawsuit on Friday, September 4, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accusing the two technology companies of copying their journalism without permission or payment to build and operate commercial AI products.
What the complaint alleges
The lawsuit claims OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the newspapers' websites — including articles sitting behind paywalls — and folded that material into the datasets used to train and run ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and the AI features built into Bing. According to the filing, the resulting systems can reproduce verbatim passages from the papers' reporting, generate close paraphrases of published articles, and answer user questions with information drawn directly from that journalism, reducing readers' need to click through to the original sites or pay for subscriptions.
The complaint uses vivid language to describe the harm, characterizing generative AI as "a snake eating its own tail" — a model that consumes the human-authored journalism it needs to function while simultaneously undercutting the outlets that produce it. A quoted passage from the filing states that products like ChatGPT and Copilot are marketed as producers of content but "in fact they are rapacious consumers, devouring human-authored content" without compensating its creators.
Companies involved and an awkward history
The Seattle Times is an independently owned regional paper based in Washington state, while Newsday serves Long Island and the greater New York City area. Notably, both Microsoft and OpenAI have previously funded journalism initiatives and fellowship programs connected to the Seattle Times, a detail that adds a layer of tension to the new legal dispute between former collaborators and now-litigants.
A Microsoft spokesperson responded to the filing by saying the company was surprised by the suit, adding that Microsoft remains "always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute." As of publication, OpenAI had not issued a detailed public statement addressing the specific claims in the complaint.
What the newspapers are asking for
Beyond monetary damages, the Seattle Times and Newsday are seeking a court order requiring the destruction of any copies of their copyrighted works held by the defendants, along with the destruction of training datasets and AI models that incorporate that material. This remedy, if granted, would go well beyond a financial settlement and could force changes to how the underlying AI systems were built.
Part of a broader legal wave
This case follows the path first cut by The New York Times, which sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023 over similar allegations that millions of its articles were used without authorization to train AI chatbots. That case remains ongoing and has become a reference point for a growing list of copyright disputes.
Legal observers note that the Seattle Times and Newsday complaint is one of dozens of lawsuits now working through U.S. courts, brought by publishers, authors, and other copyright holders against major AI developers including OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, and Meta. The core legal question in nearly all of these cases is the same: whether training AI models on copyrighted material without a license constitutes infringement, or whether it can be defended as fair use. Courts have not yet reached a consistent, final answer, and rulings in the earlier New York Times case are expected to influence how this newer suit unfolds.
Why it matters for the AI industry
The outcome of these cases carries significant weight for how AI companies source training data going forward. A ruling favoring the publishers could push AI developers toward licensing agreements with news organizations — a path some companies, including OpenAI, have already pursued with select publishers. A ruling favoring the AI companies, by contrast, could cement the current practice of large-scale web scraping as legally permissible, reshaping the economics of digital journalism at a moment when many newsrooms are already under financial pressure.