Seattle Newspapers Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI Content Use

The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in federal court, alleging that the tech companies used their journalism without permission to train and operate artificial intelligence systems.

The lawsuit claims that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the newspapers' websites, including material available only to paying subscribers, and incorporated their articles into datasets used to develop and operate products like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and AI features within Bing.

The newspapers argue that the alleged use of their work goes beyond simply training AI models, as the resulting products can reproduce passages from their articles, closely paraphrase their reporting, and generate answers that give users information without requiring them to visit the publishers' websites or purchase subscriptions.

This creates a potentially fundamental threat to the business model underpinning digital journalism, as publishers spend heavily on reporters, editors, investigations, and other newsgathering operations, while AI systems can potentially extract and redistribute the resulting information at scale.