Seattle Times, Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI Training

Whether generative-AI developers may train models on copyrighted journalism without licenses under the US fair-use doctrine has become a defining legal test for both AI economics and publishers’ digital revenue. The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, and other outlets have followed. The dispute carries an unusual twist: in 2024, the two technology companies jointly funded a $10 million Lenfest Institute AI fellowship whose inaugural newsrooms included The Seattle Times and Newsday.

The Seattle Times Company and Newsday LLC filed suit on Sept. 4, 2026, in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging OpenAI and Microsoft copied hundreds of thousands of articles, including paywalled material, to train products such as ChatGPT and Copilot. The publishers disclosed no specific damages figure but asked the court to order destruction of copies, training datasets and AI models incorporating their work. Microsoft said it was surprised and willing to discuss solutions; OpenAI did not immediately comment.