Seattle Newspapers Sue OpenAI and Microsoft for Alleged Content Theft

Seattle-based newspaper The Seattle Times and Newsday from Long Island, New York, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in federal court. They claim that the tech companies copied their journalism without permission to train AI systems.

The suit alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the newspapers' websites, including content behind paywalls, and incorporated articles into datasets used to train and operate products like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing's AI features. The newspapers said these AI products can reproduce passages from their reporting, closely paraphrase articles, and provide users with answers that reduce the need to visit their websites or buy subscriptions.

The Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote to employees, stating '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.'

OpenAI's spokesperson said its models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use. Microsoft stated they appreciate the importance of local journalism, but were surprised by the lawsuit.