Overview
- The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a 38-page complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Friday alleging that OpenAI and Microsoft copied their journalism without permission to train AI products.
- The suit says the companies scraped hundreds of thousands of articles including paywalled content and that AI tools can reproduce reporting nearly verbatim, citing an 88-word passage from Seattle Times coverage as an example.
- Plaintiffs ask for unspecified monetary damages and court orders to impound and destroy any datasets or models that contain their work, arguing that AI outputs reduce the need for readers to visit or subscribe to news sites.
- OpenAI said its models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use while Microsoft said it was surprised by the suit and is willing to discuss solutions; the complaint notes prior Microsoft and OpenAI funding ties to the Seattle Times.
- The case joins other publisher lawsuits consolidated in Manhattan and could affect whether courts limit large-scale ingestion of news for AI training or order remedies that change how models are built and how newsrooms are paid.