Seattle Times, Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright

Major Newspapers File Copyright Infringement Suit Against AI Companies

The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a federal lawsuit accusing OpenAI, Inc. and Microsoft Corp. of copying journalism without permission to train and operate AI products Reuters. The complaint was filed September 4, 2026, in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

According to the suit, the defendants scraped both newspapers' websites to build training datasets for systems including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing AI features Reuters. The newspapers allege the companies accessed content behind paywalls without authorization, raising questions about how widely AI training systems have ingested proprietary news material.

Damages and Dataset Destruction Sought

The Seattle Times and Newsday are seeking monetary damages and the destruction of training datasets and models that were built using their content Engadget. The relief sought reflects a broader legal strategy by news organizations to establish that AI companies cannot freely use journalism as training material without licensing or permission.

This case arrives as the AI industry faces mounting copyright litigation from creators and publishers. The lawsuit represents a concrete test of whether news organizations can establish property rights over their reporting in the age of large language models. The federal court venue in New York places the case in a jurisdiction that has seen similar disputes between media companies and technology platforms.

Industry Implications

The suit names two of the largest AI platform operators, both of which have deployed agentic and autonomous capabilities within their systems. The allegations center on training practices that predate many recent disclosures about data sourcing, making the case relevant to questions about transparency and consent in AI development.

The defendants have not yet filed responses to the complaint. The case is at an early stage, and discovery will likely reveal the scope and methods of data collection used to train these systems. Industry observers note this lawsuit could set precedent for how journalists' intellectual property is treated in AI model training, potentially affecting how future models are built and which data sources companies can legally incorporate without licensing agreements.