Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft over AI training data

Two more US news organizations, The Seattle Times and Newsday, have sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the companies of using their journalism to train AI systems without permission. According to TechCrunch, which first reported the suit, the case widens a legal fight that started when The New York Times took both companies to court in 2023.

What the publishers allege

According to TechCrunch, the complaint argues that the rise of AI could leave the journalism industry "broken beyond repair." It describes generative AI as "a snake eating its own tail," one that could "destroy the very organizations" whose content it is trained on.

The lawsuit draws a sharp line between how AI products are marketed and what the publishers say they actually do. "AI products like ChatGPT and CoPilot are touted as producers of content, but in fact they are rapacious consumers, devouring human-authored content and delivering back to the world copies and derivative imitations of that same original content they consumed to achieve their commercial objectives," the complaint states, as quoted by TechCrunch.

The core claim echoes those in earlier cases: that copyrighted news articles were copied at scale to train commercial AI systems without permission or payment, and that the resulting products now threaten the economics of the outlets that produced the original reporting.

A growing line of plaintiffs

The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner and investor Microsoft in 2023 over alleged copyright infringement, and TechCrunch notes that other publications have brought similar claims as that case has continued through the courts. The addition of The Seattle Times and Newsday extends the list of outlets willing to test in court whether training AI models on copyrighted news constitutes infringement.

An awkward prior relationship

The Seattle Times' participation stands out for another reason: according to TechCrunch, both Microsoft and OpenAI have previously funded journalism projects and fellowships at the organization. The suit therefore comes from a publisher with direct financial ties to the defendants, which underlines how funding arrangements and partnerships have not settled the underlying dispute over training data.

Microsoft is not contesting the merits publicly so far. A company spokesperson told GeekWire, in comments relayed by TechCrunch, that the company is "surprised by the lawsuit" but is "always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute." The TechCrunch report included no equivalent statement from OpenAI.

Why it matters

The wave of publisher lawsuits has become one of the defining legal questions of the generative AI era: whether training commercial models on copyrighted news articles counts as fair use, and what, if anything, publishers are owed for it. The New York Times case has yet to answer that question, and every new plaintiff adds pressure.

For news organizations, the stakes are framed in existential terms by the lawsuit itself: if AI systems summarize and substitute for original reporting without compensating the outlets that produced it, the economics of newsgathering erode further. For AI companies and their investors, an adverse ruling could mean costly licensing regimes or new limits on training data. And the detail that a publisher funded by Microsoft and OpenAI is now suing both firms signals that fellowships and partnerships are no substitute for a legal answer.