Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over Copyright

Legal pressure on artificial intelligence developers continues to mount as The Seattle Times and Newsday have launched copyright infringement litigation against OpenAI and Microsoft.

The two regional newspaper publishers claim that OpenAI ingested their proprietary reporting without authorization to train its large language models. The complaint asserts that the resulting software frequently outputs excerpts of their copyrighted journalism in response to user prompts, according to reporting by The Verge.

Microsoft is named as a co-defendant due to its multi-billion-dollar partnership with OpenAI, which supplies the computing infrastructure for model training and incorporates the technology into its own commercial ecosystem.

The action follows a steady cadence of intellectual property lawsuits targeting generative AI firms. Several major news organizations, book authors, and visual artists have mounted similar courtroom challenges, pushing back against tech firms that treat published editorial archives as free training inputs.

For the broader media and entertainment ecosystem, these legal battles serve as a critical test case for digital rights management. With studios, publishers, and agencies trying to establish commercial value for their archives, the litigation will help decide whether AI labs must negotiate licensing fees or can continue relying on fair use defenses to harvest proprietary material.

OpenAI has consistently maintained that utilizing publicly available text to train its models complies with fair use doctrine, though courts have yet to issue definitive rulings on the matter.