Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged use of journalism

• The Seattle Times and Newsday filed the case in the Southern District of New York on September 4, 2026, naming nine OpenAI entities and Microsoft. ^[1]
• The complaint alleges that the defendants scraped the newspapers’ websites, including paywalled material, and used the articles in systems behind ChatGPT, Copilot and Bing AI features. ^[2]
• The newspapers cite an alleged 88-word verbatim reproduction from Seattle Times coverage of the Boeing 737 MAX crashes, as well as other alleged close reproductions and paraphrases. ^[3]
• The complaint seeks damages, injunctions and the impoundment or destruction of copies, training datasets and models incorporating the publishers’ works. ^[2]

The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft in Manhattan federal court on September 4, alleging that the companies copied their journalism without permission, including articles behind paywalls, to train and operate commercial AI systems. [1]

The complaint says the systems can reproduce passages from the newspapers, closely paraphrase their reporting and answer questions in ways that reduce visits to the publishers’ websites and the need for subscriptions. It asks for financial relief and an order requiring the destruction of affected copies, datasets and models. [2]

The complaint reaches beyond model training #

The case, The Seattle Times Company and Newsday LLC v. OpenAI Inc. et al., is docketed as 1:26-cv-07644 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The defendants include nine OpenAI corporate entities and Microsoft Corporation. The plaintiffs demanded a jury trial. [1]

A secondary review of the filed complaint identifies seven counts: direct copyright infringement; vicarious copyright infringement; two claims under Section 1202(b) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act over alleged removal of copyright-management information; and trademark-dilution claims under federal, Washington and New York law. [4]

The trademark claims are based in part on alleged misattribution. The publishers say AI products can associate their names and marks with generated material that they did not publish, including inaccurate or fabricated content. The complaint’s copyright exhibits reportedly identify 596 registered Seattle Times works and 770 Newsday registrations, while separately alleging that hundreds of thousands of articles were copied. [4]

The filing does not state a specific dollar figure in the publicly described relief. It seeks actual or statutory damages, profits, injunctive relief, attorneys’ fees and the impoundment or destruction of copies of the publishers’ works, training datasets and large language models that incorporate them. [2]

The publishers cite specific output examples #

The complaint describes an alleged ChatGPT response that reproduced 88 consecutive words from The Seattle Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the Boeing 737 MAX crashes after a user supplied the article’s headline and web address. It also presents examples involving Newsday and other Seattle Times stories that the publishers say were reproduced or closely paraphrased. [3]

Those examples are allegations, not findings that the court has accepted. They may help the publishers establish copying of particular expression, while also leaving factual questions about how each response was generated. A prompt containing a URL can implicate live retrieval or browsing as well as material retained during model training; the complaint presents both training and operational uses of the articles as part of the alleged conduct. [3]

OpenAI told Reuters that its models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use. Microsoft said it was surprised by the lawsuit, emphasized the importance of local journalism and said it was willing to discuss possible solutions. [2]

The case also involves an existing relationship between the publishers and the defendants. Microsoft Philanthropies supports some Seattle Times journalism projects, and Microsoft and OpenAI jointly funded a $10 million Lenfest Institute AI fellowship that included both newspapers. GeekWire reported that it was unclear whether licensing negotiations preceded the filing. [3]

The case enters an active New York litigation track #

The lawsuit arrives as the broader OpenAI copyright fight moves toward dispositive motions. The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, alleging that the companies used millions of Times articles to build AI products and that ChatGPT sometimes reproduced Times material. The Times case has since been joined by other news organizations, including the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Ziff Davis and the Center for Investigative Reporting. [5]

Those news cases and the consolidated author litigation are proceeding before Judge Sidney H. Stein in the Southern District of New York. The Authors Guild and co-plaintiffs filed a summary-judgment motion on September 4, while OpenAI and Microsoft filed their own motions in the related litigation, according to the Guild and GeekWire. [6]

The Justice Department separately filed a brief in the Times case supporting OpenAI’s fair-use position. It argued that training language models on internet writings can produce broad creative and public benefits and that ruling for the publishers could hinder scientific and economic development. The Times responded that AI companies should pay for the content that makes their products possible. [7]

The new case differs from the Times litigation in its pleaded combination of training, alleged retrieval or operational use, copyright-management information and trademark claims over false association with the newspapers’ brands. Whether those additional theories survive early motions will depend on evidence about the systems’ data flows, the source of particular outputs and the economic effect on the publishers.

Companies mentioned #

Further sources #

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