Seattle Newspapers Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over Alleged AI Content Scraping

The Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft in federal court over allegations that the tech giants used their journalism without permission to train and operate AI systems.

The lawsuit claims that the companies scraped content from the newspapers' websites, including articles protected by paywalls, and incorporated the material into datasets used for AI products such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing's AI features.

The two newspapers argue that the AI systems can reproduce portions of their reporting or closely rework their articles, which concerns them because readers may get the information from an AI service instead of visiting the publication or paying for a subscription.

Seattle Times president and CEO Alan Fisco said the newspaper needs to protect journalism that costs millions of dollars each year to produce.