Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged news copyright infringement

The Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft, adding two more U.S. newspapers to the expanding copyright fight over how artificial intelligence companies use journalism. According to Reuters, the lawsuit was filed on September 5 and accuses the companies of using the newspapers’ articles without permission to train and operate AI products.

The case lands in a legal landscape already crowded with publisher challenges. The New York Times, several regional newspapers, authors and other rights holders have brought related claims against AI developers, arguing that large language models were built with copyrighted material taken at massive scale. AI companies have generally argued that training systems on publicly available information can be lawful and transformative, while publishers say the models compete with their reporting businesses and can reproduce or substitute for protected work.

For local and regional news organizations, the dispute is especially sensitive. Newspapers like The Seattle Times and Newsday invest in reporting that covers courts, schools, local government, investigations, sports and communities that national outlets may not follow closely. If their archives become training data for AI tools without compensation, publishers argue that the value of that reporting is transferred into commercial systems controlled by technology companies. The legal question is whether that use is protected by fair use or whether it requires licensing.

The lawsuit also shows how Microsoft remains tied to the broader debate because of its partnership with OpenAI and its integration of OpenAI models into products such as Copilot. Even when an AI model is developed by one company, distribution, cloud infrastructure and product packaging can bring partners into litigation. That makes the outcome of these cases important not only for model labs, but also for platform companies that embed generative AI into search, office software and developer tools.

The practical stakes go beyond damages. Publishers want control over whether and how their journalism is used, while AI companies need large, current and high-quality text to improve model behavior. Some media organizations have chosen licensing deals with AI firms; others have chosen litigation. The split suggests that the market for news data is still being negotiated through contracts and courts at the same time.

No single lawsuit will settle every question, but the addition of The Seattle Times and Newsday increases pressure on OpenAI and Microsoft as courts consider how copyright law applies to training, retrieval and generated responses. For the AI industry, the message is clear: access to reliable information is becoming a business and legal constraint, not merely a data engineering problem.