The Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI Training

September 06, 2026
The Seattle Times and Newsday allege that OpenAI and Microsoft used their journalism without permission to train and operate AI products. They seek damages and the destruction of affected training datasets and models.
The Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI Training

The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft in federal court over alleged copyright infringement, The Seattle Times reports. The complaint says the companies used the newspapers' articles without permission to train large language models.

The lawsuit alleges that the companies scraped material from the newspapers' websites, including content behind paywalls. It also says AI products can reproduce or closely paraphrase reporting and falsely attribute fabricated material to the publications.

The newspapers seek damages and the destruction of training datasets and AI models that contain their work. OpenAI said its models train on publicly available data under fair use, while Microsoft said it was surprised by the lawsuit and was willing to discuss solutions.

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