Seattle Newspapers Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI Content Theft

The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on September 4, accusing them of copyright infringement.

The newspapers claim that OpenAI and Microsoft collected materials from their websites, including content available only through paid subscriptions, to train artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and the AI features of the Bing search engine.

The publications say these articles were included in datasets used to train and operate the companies' products, which can reproduce excerpts from their publications, closely paraphrase articles, and provide answers that make users less likely to visit their websites or subscribe.

The Seattle Times President and Chief Executive Officer Alan Fisco told employees that the publication spends millions of dollars annually to create content and must protect it from use without consent or compensation.