Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft for unauthorized use of content to train AI

The Seattle Times and Newsday newspapers sued OpenAI and Microsoft this Friday (4), alleging in a United States federal court that the technology companies copied, without authorization, their journalistic content to train artificial intelligence systems.

The lawsuit, filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, says OpenAI and Microsoft scraped data from newspaper websites, including paywalled content, and embedded articles in datasets used to train and operate products such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI capabilities.

The outlets, based in Seattle and Long Island, New York, stated that the companies' AI products can reproduce excerpts from their reports, paraphrase articles in a very similar way to the original and provide users with answers that reduce the need to access their websites or subscribe to their services.

"We firmly believe that we must defend our content — which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce — against use without our consent or compensation," Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote to employees, according to the newspaper.

A spokesperson for San Francisco-based OpenAI said its models are trained on publicly available data and are based on the principle of fair use, without commenting specifically on the process.

A spokesperson for Microsoft, based near Seattle, Washington, said in an email that it is available to seek solutions.

"Although we are surprised by the process, we recognize the importance of local journalism and are always willing to dialogue and seek solutions to this type of dispute," he said.

The Seattle Times and Newsday are calling for a ruling that would destroy copies of their works, as well as the training datasets or AI models that embody them.

The lawsuit is similar to a lawsuit filed by the New York Times in 2023 that accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of articles from the newspaper without authorization to train ChatGPT.

The case remains ongoing and is one of dozens of lawsuits brought by copyright holders against technology companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta for what they consider to be misuse of their material to train the technology.