The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a federal lawsuit accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of copyright infringement, saying the companies used their journalism to train AI products without asking or paying for it. The case joins a growing list of copyright infringement lawsuits filed by news publishers against major AI developers over the past few years.
Background: A Pattern That Started With The New York Times
This isn’t the first time a major US newspaper has taken OpenAI and Microsoft to court over this. The New York Times filed a similar suit back in December 2023, arguing that millions of its articles had been used without permission to train ChatGPT. That case is still working its way through the courts.
Since then, the list of plaintiffs has kept growing. In June 2026, a coalition representing roughly 400 local newspapers filed a comparable action. The Seattle Times and Newsday lawsuit, filed this past Friday, adds two more well-known names to a legal fight that’s quickly becoming an industry-wide reckoning over how AI companies source their training data.
What The Lawsuit Actually Claims
The suit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of scraping content directly from the newspapers’ websites, including articles sitting behind paywalls. That scraped material, the complaint alleges, was folded into training datasets used to build and run ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing’s AI features.
One specific example cited in the complaint involves an 88-word excerpt from the Seattle Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Boeing 737 MAX crashes. According to the filing, AI systems built by the two companies were able to reproduce that passage in near-verbatim form, which the newspapers point to as concrete proof that their copyrighted work ended up baked into these products.
Quotes From Both Sides
“This was not an easy decision,” Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote in an email to staff on Friday. He said the paper felt it had no real choice but to defend content it spends millions of dollars a year producing from being used without consent or compensation.
A Microsoft spokesperson responded the same day, saying the company was surprised by the suit but remained open to talking things through. The statement noted Microsoft’s appreciation for the Seattle Times’ importance to the region and said the door was open to exploring solutions.
OpenAI, for its part, has stuck to the position it’s taken in other similar cases: that its models are trained on publicly available data and that the process falls under fair use. The company hasn’t issued a specific statement responding to this particular filing yet.
Impact: What This Means For AI and Journalism
Cases like this are pushing toward a fairly basic question: can AI companies keep training on copyrighted journalism for free, or will publishers actually get paid or licensed for it going forward? Dozens of similar suits are already stacked up, from major national papers down to smaller regional networks, so courts have a lot of overlapping ground to work through before anyone gets a clear answer.
There’s also an awkward wrinkle specific to this case. Back in 2024, Microsoft and OpenAI funded a $10 million AI fellowship through the Lenfest Institute, and both the Seattle Times and Newsday were among the outlets that took part. That earlier collaboration sits oddly next to a lawsuit accusing the same companies of stealing content outright, and it’s the kind of detail that tends to come up again once discovery starts.
Conclusion: What Comes Next
The Seattle Times and Newsday case will likely move slowly through the same courts already handling the New York Times’ suit, and legal observers are watching to see whether any of these cases reach a settlement or licensing deal before going to trial. Given how many similar lawsuits are stacking up against OpenAI, Microsoft, and other AI developers, this case is probably not going to be the last headline of its kind this year.
FAQs
How do I write a copyright disclaimer?
A basic copyright disclaimer usually states who owns the content, what rights are reserved, and how the material can or can’t be used by others.Unauthorized use or reproduction of this material without express permission is prohibited” covers the basics. If you’re posting on social platforms, it helps to also specify whether you allow sharing with credit versus reproduction without permission, since platforms like Facebook and Instagram don’t automatically protect your rights just because you posted something.
How to caption copyright on Facebook?
On Facebook, a copyright caption typically goes directly under your photo or video and states ownership clearly do not repost without permission.” It’s worth remembering that simply posting content publicly doesn’t waive your rights to it, but a visible caption makes it much easier to prove your intent if someone reposts your work without asking, and it gives other users a heads-up before they even consider reusing it.
Which is an example of copyright infringement?
The Seattle Times and Newsday lawsuit itself is a good real-world example: the newspapers allege that OpenAI and Microsoft copied their published articles, including paywalled content, without permission or payment, and used that material to train AI products that can then reproduce or closely paraphrase the original reporting. Other common examples include reposting someone else’s photography without credit or license, using copyrighted music in a video without clearance, or copying substantial sections of a published article onto another website without the original author’s consent.
