The Seattle Times and Newsday filed the lawsuit Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that the companies copied material from their websites, including articles available only to paying subscribers, and incorporated the content into datasets used to train and operate AI products.
The newspapers allege that their reporting has been used in systems powering products such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and AI features integrated into Bing.
According to the lawsuit, the AI products can reproduce passages from the newspapers' stories, closely paraphrase their reporting and generate answers that may satisfy users without requiring them to visit the newspapers' websites or purchase subscriptions.
The newspapers argue that such practices threaten a core source of revenue for journalism while allowing technology companies to benefit from reporting that requires substantial investment to produce.
“We feel strongly that we must defend our content - which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce - from being used without our consent or compensation,” Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote to employees, according to the newspaper.
The legal action adds two prominent regional news organizations to a rapidly expanding confrontation between the traditional media industry and the companies developing generative AI.
OpenAI, which is based in San Francisco, defended the broader basis on which it trains its AI systems, saying its models use publicly available information and are grounded in the principle of fair use. A company spokesperson did not specifically comment on the allegations contained in the lawsuit.
Microsoft, whose headquarters are near Seattle, expressed surprise at the litigation while acknowledging the importance of local journalism.
“While we’re surprised by the lawsuit, we appreciate the importance of local journalism and we’re always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email.
The newspapers are seeking a court order requiring the companies to destroy copies of their copyrighted works, as well as training datasets and AI models that incorporate their material.
The case adds to a growing body of copyright litigation surrounding the development of generative AI. Publishers, authors, artists and other rights holders have increasingly challenged technology companies over the collection and use of their work to train AI models.
A BROADER COPYRIGHT BATTLE
The lawsuit echoes a landmark case brought by The New York Times in 2023 against OpenAI and Microsoft.
The Times accused the companies of using millions of its articles without permission to train OpenAI's chatbot, arguing that the technology companies were benefiting from journalism while potentially undermining the very publications responsible for producing it.
That case remains ongoing.
The latest lawsuit is part of a much wider wave of legal challenges against AI companies. Dozens of copyright holders have sued companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, alleging that copyrighted material was used without authorization in the development and training of AI systems.
At the heart of the disputes is a fundamental question for the rapidly expanding AI industry: whether companies can legally use vast quantities of copyrighted material to train systems capable of generating new content based on what they have learned.
For newspapers, the stakes extend beyond ownership of individual articles. Publishers argue that if AI systems can provide readers with the substance of their reporting without sending traffic to the original source, the technology could weaken subscriptions, advertising revenue and the economic foundation of professional journalism.
For AI companies, the cases could determine how they are allowed to obtain and use the enormous quantities of information required to develop increasingly sophisticated models.
The legal battle between publishers and technology companies is therefore likely to shape not only the future of AI but also the economics of news production and distribution in the digital age.