The Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI Training

The legal offensive against generative artificial intelligence companies expanded again as The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a joint copyright infringement lawsuit targeting OpenAI and Microsoft.

The complaint alleges that unauthorized scraping of journalistic archives directly threatens the economic viability of the reporting industry. The news organizations argue that without legal intervention, generative AI could leave the news business "broken beyond repair," describing the technology's reliance on published reporting as "a snake eating its own tail" that could ultimately "destroy the very organizations" supplying the training material.

"AI products like ChatGPT and CoPilot are touted as producers of content, but in fact they are rapacious consumers, devouring human-authored content and delivering back to the world copies and derivative imitations of that same original content they consumed to achieve their commercial objectives," the complaint stated, as reported by TechCrunch.

The action follows a landmark copyright lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, which triggered a cascade of similar litigation across the digital publishing sector. The Seattle Times' participation creates a particularly awkward dynamic in the Pacific Northwest, as both Microsoft and OpenAI have previously sponsored journalism projects and funded fellowships at the local paper.

A Microsoft spokesperson expressed surprise at the filing, telling GeekWire that the company is "surprised by the lawsuit" but remains "always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute."

The Widening Legal Battle

The steady addition of regional publishers to the courtroom fight highlights the unresolved legal tension driving modern AI development: whether training foundation models on copyrighted web content qualifies as fair use. While some media conglomerates have signed commercial content licensing deals with OpenAI and its peers, other publishers are betting that judicial rulings will force tech giants to pay substantially higher compensation for access to human reporting.