The Seattle Times and Newsday have become the latest major news publishers to take legal action against OpenAI, accusing the artificial intelligence company of using their reporting without permission to train its AI models.
The lawsuit also names Microsoft as a defendant, pointing to the company’s Copilot products, which rely on OpenAI technology. The case adds more pressure to a growing legal battle over whether AI companies can train large language models on copyrighted journalism without licensing deals.
Seattle Times and Newsday OpenAI lawsuit: what the publishers allege
According to the complaint, The Seattle Times and Newsday claim OpenAI copied and ingested their articles as part of the massive datasets used to build and improve its AI systems. The publishers also allege that OpenAI tools can reproduce portions of their journalism in response to user prompts.
That allegation is central to many of the copyright cases now facing AI companies. Publishers argue that their work is being used to create commercial products that may compete with them, while AI firms have generally maintained that model training can fall under fair use.
Why Microsoft is included in the AI copyright lawsuit
Microsoft is named because its Copilot tools are built around OpenAI’s models. The publishers are effectively arguing that Microsoft benefits from the same alleged misuse of copyrighted news content by bringing OpenAI-powered AI features into consumer and business software.
Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI and has integrated the company’s models across products including Copilot, Bing, Windows, and Microsoft 365. That close partnership has made Microsoft a frequent co-defendant in publisher lawsuits targeting OpenAI.
OpenAI faces growing pressure from news publishers
This case follows similar legal action from The New York Times, Ziff Davis, Merriam-Webster, and Encyclopedia Britannica. Nearly 400 local newspapers have also sued OpenAI and Microsoft, signaling that the dispute is no longer limited to a handful of national media brands.
The stakes are enormous. If courts side with publishers, AI companies could face costly licensing requirements, damages, or restrictions on how they train future models. If OpenAI and Microsoft prevail, the decision could strengthen the legal footing for AI training practices across the tech industry.
AI training data and journalism: the bigger fight
At the heart of the conflict is a difficult question: who gets paid when journalism helps train a profitable AI system? News organizations say high-quality reporting takes time, money, and staff, and that AI companies should not be able to build products from that work without consent.
AI developers counter that large-scale training requires broad access to information and that their models do not simply function as article archives. Courts will now have to weigh those arguments against existing copyright law, which was not written with generative AI in mind.
For media companies, the lawsuits are also about survival. Search traffic, advertising revenue, and referral patterns are already shifting as AI answers become more common. Publishers fear that if chatbots summarize or reproduce their reporting directly, readers may have less reason to visit the original source.
What happens next in the OpenAI and Microsoft case?
The Seattle Times and Newsday lawsuit is likely to move slowly, as similar cases are already working through the courts. Still, each new complaint adds momentum to the broader legal and political debate around AI copyright, licensing, and the future of digital news.
Whether the outcome brings settlements, licensing deals, or courtroom precedent, one thing is clear: the relationship between AI companies and publishers is being rewritten in real time.
Tags: #OpenAI #MicrosoftCopilot #AICopyright #NewsPublishers #ArtificialIntelligence
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