The daily news publications the Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of scraping website content to train AI models.

The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft used work published in both outlets including paywalled content to train products including ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.

Both publications allege that the models trained using this data have harmed media business models, pointing to sectoral data that suggests search referrals are declining rapidly.

Alan Fisco, president and chief executive of the Seattle Times, notified employees of the lawsuit in an email on Friday, per the publication’s own reporting.

“This was not an easy decision,” he said. “However, 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.”

A report by Chartbeat published in January found pageviews from Google Search fell 34 per cent in the year to December 2025.

The Seattle Times and Newsday are latest in a series of media companies to launch lawsuits against AI developers for allegedly infringing upon their copyright. The New York Times launched a lawsuit against OpenAI on these grounds in 2023, seeking to “hold them responsible for the billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages that they owe”.

A coalition of Canadian news outlets including CBC, Metroland Media, Postmedia, The Globe and Mail, The Canadian Press, and Toronto Star launched their own lawsuit in 2024, accusing OpenAI of using unauthorised content for training purposes.

Last week, the US Department of Justice filed a brief supporting OpenAI and arguing that it is in the national interests for AI companies to treat open internet data as fair use to enable scientific advancement.

“The United States has a strong interest in ​this court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law,” the brief stated.

OpenAI has previously claimed that it would be “impossible” to train LLMs without using copyrighted material.

A Microsoft spokesperson told the Seattle Times: “While we’re surprised by the lawsuit, we appreciate the importance of the Seattle Times to our region and we’re always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute”.

An OpenAI spokesperson separately told the publication that the firm ensures its training is “grounded in fair use, which helps hundreds of millions of people improve their daily lives and delivers benefits such as empowering human creativity, science, and medical research”.

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