You can access the lawsuit here.

The Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft in a US federal court. They allege that the companies copied their copyrighted journalism without permission or payment. They also allege that the companies used the material to train and operate generative AI systems. The companies allegedly reproduced parts of the articles in AI-generated answers. The complaint was filed in the Southern District of New York on September 4, 2026.

What is the case about? The publishers allege that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped their websites, including paywalled content, and incorporated copies into datasets used to train, fine-tune and ground AI models. The complaint names WebText, WebText2, Common Crawl and Microsoft’s Bing search index among the sources allegedly used.

The publishers say their content was copied despite restrictions in their terms of service. The Seattle Times prohibits using its content for AI training or grounding and automated scraping, while Newsday’s terms prohibit using its content to develop software, including AI systems. Newsday also says its robots.txt file instructed OpenAI and Common Crawl not to crawl its site.

The complaint further alleges that the defendants removed copyright information, including authors’ names, article titles and copyright notices, from some copies.

The central argument

The publishers argue that the issue is not simply whether AI models can learn from publicly available material. Their central claim is that OpenAI and Microsoft copied protected journalism. They then used those copies to build commercial products. These products can provide readers with the same information without directing them to the original publishers.

The complaint puts it particularly strongly: “There is nothing transformative about copying The Seattle Times’ and Newsday’s journalism…”

The publishers also allege that AI systems can reproduce their reporting almost word for word. They cite a test in which a model allegedly reproduced 88 consecutive words from a Seattle Times article. The article covered the Boeing 737 MAX crisis. The model allegedly reproduced the text when given the article’s headline and URL. The complaint also gives examples involving Newsday articles.

The complaint describes the broader concern this way: “AI products like ChatGPT and CoPilot are touted as producers of content, but in fact they are rapacious consumers…”

It adds: “AI that is trained on painstakingly researched, expensive-to-produce content threatens to destroy the very news organizations by competing directly with them…”

The publishers’ licensing argument

The publishers point to OpenAI’s licensing agreements with other media organisations. These include the Associated Press, News Corp, Axios, Axel Springer, The Atlantic, Financial Times, Dotdash Meredith and Vox Media.

They argue that these agreements show a commercial market exists for licensing news content to AI systems. However, they allege that OpenAI never sought or obtained a licence from either plaintiff. The complaint says publicly disclosed terms of three agreements show that OpenAI paid more than $300 million for news-content rights. The terms of the other agreements remain private.

What damage do they claim?

The publishers say AI-generated answers can reduce visits to their websites, affecting advertising and subscription revenue.

The complaint cites industry data showing that search referral traffic to midsized regional and metropolitan daily publishers fell about 47%. The decline occurred between December 2024 and December 2025. By comparison, larger national publishers saw a decline of about 22%. It argues that AI-generated answers can keep users on AI platforms instead of sending them to publishers.

The complaint says: “Defendants’ products reduce the number of readers who click through to Plaintiffs’ own websites…”

The publishers also argue that users who can get satisfactory answers from ChatGPT or Copilot may have less reason to subscribe to their publications. They say the loss of traffic, subscriptions, advertising and potential licensing deals creates a wider financial threat to their businesses.

The complaint describes this as: “The negative flywheel effect will cause further harm to publishers…”

Claims over false attribution: The lawsuit also alleges trademark dilution. The publishers say AI systems sometimes “hallucinate” information and wrongly associate fabricated or inaccurate material with their brands.

For The Seattle Times and Newsday, the complaint alleges that such false attribution can damage the reputation and distinctiveness of their names.

The case brings copyright, Digital Millennium Copyright Act and trademark-related claims under federal, Washington and New York laws.

Wider copyright fight over AI training

The lawsuit comes nearly three years after The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023. The Times alleged that the companies copied its journalism without permission to develop AI models. It also alleged that the models could reproduce parts of Times articles, including paywalled content. Other publishers have since brought similar cases.

The Seattle Times case also has an unusual connection to the defendants: Microsoft and OpenAI have previously funded some of the newspaper’s journalism projects and fellowships.

A Microsoft spokesperson told GeekWire that the company is “surprised by the lawsuit” but is “always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute.”

The case also comes as the US government has backed OpenAI on a key part of the wider copyright debate. In a September 1 filing in The New York Times case, the US Department of Justice argued that using copyrighted works to train AI models can qualify as fair use. It separated model training from potentially infringing AI outputs.

What are they asking the court to do?

The publishers are seeking statutory damages or actual damages and OpenAI and Microsoft’s profits, along with attorneys’ fees and other costs.

They also want a permanent injunction against the alleged infringement and trademark dilution. Most significantly, they ask the court to order the impoundment or destruction of copies of their works and LLMs and training datasets that incorporate their works or derivatives. They have also demanded a jury trial.

The court has not established these allegations. The lawsuit presents the publishers’ account of the dispute. The case will have to determine whether the alleged copying, model training, AI outputs and commercial use violate the publishers’ rights.

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