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Seattle News Outlets Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over Alleged Copyright Infringement
The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that they used website content to train AI models without permission.
The lawsuit claims that the companies scraped paywalled content from both publications to develop products like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.
According to the Seattle Times' president and CEO Alan Fisco, 'this was not an easy decision,' but the company felt it necessary to defend its content, which costs millions of dollars a year to produce.
The publications point to sectoral data showing that search referrals are declining rapidly, with pageviews from Google Search falling 34% in the year to December 2025, according to a report by Chartbeat published in January.