Seattle Times, Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft; allege copyright infringement

The Seattle Times and Newsday recently sued tech giants OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming the companies unlawfully copied their journalism to train their AI systems. The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, asserts that OpenAI and Microsoft harvested articles from the newspapers' websites, including paywalled content, and integrated them into datasets used to develop products like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing's AI features.

Both Seattle-based publications expressed concern over the companies' AI products' ability to reproduce their articles and closely paraphrase their content, potentially diminishing the need for readers to visit their websites or purchase subscriptions. Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco emphasized the importance of defending their content, which costs millions of dollars to produce annually.

OpenAI, based in San Francisco, stated that its models are trained on publicly available data, citing fair use without elaborating on the lawsuit. Microsoft, headquartered near Seattle in Washington state, expressed surprise at the legal action, affirming their appreciation for local journalism and openness to resolving the dispute.

The Seattle Times and Newsday are requesting an injunction to have their works destroyed and to compel the removal of their content from training datasets or AI models. This lawsuit follows a similar suit filed by The New York Times in 2023, which also accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train their popular chatbot.

The ongoing case is one of numerous legal actions brought by copyright holders against technology firms accused of exploiting their material for AI system training.