Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft

The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the tech giants used their copyrighted journalism without permission to train generative AI models. The publishers claim that the companies' chatbots, including Microsoft's Copilot which is built on OpenAI's technology, frequently reproduce passages from their reporting in response to user queries. This unauthorized use, they argue, directly harms their business models by reducing web traffic and subscription revenue.

As part of the legal action, the two news organizations are seeking the destruction of any copies of their works held by the defendants, as well as the training datasets and the AI models themselves that incorporate their content. This lawsuit mirrors previous legal actions taken against OpenAI by other major publishers, including The New York Times, Ziff Davis, Merriam-Webster, and Encyclopedia Britannica. Furthermore, the Seattle Times and Newsday join a growing coalition of nearly 400 local newspapers that have recently sued both OpenAI and Microsoft over similar copyright concerns.

For AI practitioners and developers, this escalating legal battle highlights the growing risks associated with training large language models on web-scraped data. If courts rule in favor of the publishers and order the destruction of models built on infringed data, it could set a devastating precedent for the industry. Companies may be forced to completely retrain their systems or secure expensive licensing agreements before utilizing any publisher content. This shift underscores the urgent need for developers to establish transparent data-provenance pipelines and prioritize licensed datasets to mitigate future legal liabilities.