Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft over AI training, days after Justice Department backs the companies

The Seattle Times Co. and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday, accusing the companies of scraping the newspapers' journalism, including articles behind paywalls, to build the datasets that train and run ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI features. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is the latest in a lengthening line of copyright cases brought by news publishers against the two companies, and it arrives days after the Justice Department told the same court that AI training of this kind should generally be treated as legal.

The complaint, filed under case number 1:26-cv-07644, accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of copyright and trademark infringement. It alleges the companies incorporated hundreds of thousands of Seattle Times and Newsday articles into training data, fine-tuning sets and retrieval systems that power their AI products, and that those products can reproduce passages from the papers' reporting verbatim or in close paraphrase. The suit also accuses the companies of trademark dilution, arguing that the AI tools sometimes generate fabricated content and falsely attribute it to the two newspapers.

A CEO's Reluctant Case

Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco told employees in an email, reported by his own newsroom, that "this was not an easy decision."

"However, 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," Fisco wrote, adding that the lawsuit is "not about impeding AI innovation. It is about making sure that innovation does not come at the expense of our business model."

Newsday, a Long Island, N.Y., daily, joined as co-plaintiff. Attorneys for the two outlets told the court that AI products are causing measurable harm to the news business, citing industry data showing that search-referral traffic to midsize publishers fell 47 percent year over year in December 2025. The suit seeks unspecified damages along with a court order requiring the "impoundment and/or destruction" of copies of the papers' work, along with any training datasets or AI models built using it.

How We Got Here

The case follows a pattern set by The New York Times' 2023 lawsuit against the same two companies, which was later consolidated with similar claims from other newspaper chains into a multidistrict litigation before U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein in Manhattan, now docketed as In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation. That consolidated case has drawn plaintiffs including large newspaper groups and remains active, with new filings entered as recently as this past weekend. A coalition of daily papers owned by Alden Global Capital sued OpenAI two years ago, and a group of 35 publishers representing more than 400 community newspapers filed a separate suit last year.

What makes the Seattle Times and Newsday filing notable is its timing. On September 1, the Justice Department filed a 20-page statement of interest in the consolidated OpenAI litigation, telling Judge Stein directly that "the training of AI models on copyrighted material, in and of itself, does not violate copyright laws." The filing, submitted by the department's Michael Weisbuch, cast the fair-use question as a matter of national competitiveness, invoking President Trump's January 2025 executive order on "Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence" and warning that copyright rules making AI harder to build in the United States "threaten national security and give a competitive advantage to foreign adversaries." Legal-trade coverage of the filing noted that government lawyers separately argued a "market dilution" theory advanced by some copyright holders is legally flawed.

A Justice Department statement of interest does not bind the court, but it marks the first time the federal government has staked out a formal position in the wave of AI copyright suits brought by authors, musicians and news organizations. Filing a new case one business day after the department's brief was made public signals that the newspapers do not consider the government's intervention decisive.

Who Is Affected

The dispute touches an unusually tangled set of relationships. Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI since 2019 and remains its principal cloud-computing partner and a major shareholder, even after the companies restructured their partnership this year to give OpenAI more independence. Microsoft Philanthropies also underwrites some Seattle Times journalism projects, and the newspaper's parent company received a Lenfest Institute for Journalism grant — funded jointly by Microsoft and OpenAI with a combined $10 million — to hire a two-year AI fellow in 2024. The Seattle Times has used the money for advertising functions and holds ChatGPT licenses for internal data analysis, while maintaining a public policy that bars using AI to write its stories and requires disclosure when AI tools play a significant role in producing one.

For OpenAI and Microsoft, the suit adds another defendant pairing to litigation whose outcome could reshape the economics of how AI companies obtain training data industry-wide. For publishers generally, the case is being watched as a test of whether newsrooms already strained by falling referral traffic can extract licensing revenue or damages from AI companies before the fair-use question is settled at a higher court.

Reaction

A Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement that the company was "surprised by the lawsuit" but "appreciate[s] the importance of the Seattle Times to our region" and remains "always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute." An OpenAI spokesperson said the company's models are trained on publicly available data "grounded in fair use, which helps hundreds of millions of people improve their daily lives and delivers benefits such as empowering human creativity, science, and medical research."

What Happens Next

The Seattle Times and Newsday case will proceed separately in the Southern District of New York even as the larger consolidated litigation before Judge Stein continues toward summary judgment briefing, according to court trackers monitoring the docket. How Stein eventually rules on the fair-use question in that case is likely to weigh heavily on this one and on the dozen-plus similar suits pending against OpenAI, Microsoft and other AI developers. Neither OpenAI nor Microsoft has yet filed a formal response to the Seattle Times and Newsday complaint in court records.