The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday, alleging in federal court that the tech companies copied the newspapers’ journalism without permission to train their AI systems.
The suit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the newspapers’ websites, including content behind paywalls, and incorporated articles into datasets used to train and operate products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI features.
The newspapers, based in Seattle and Long Island, New York, said the companies’ AI products can reproduce passages from their reporting, closely paraphrase articles and provide users with answers that reduce the need to visit their websites or buy subscriptions.
“We feel strongly that we must defend our content — which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce — from being used without our consent or compensation,” Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote to employees, according to the newspaper.
A spokesperson for San Francisco-based OpenAI said its models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use, without commenting specifically on the lawsuit.
