Seattle Times, Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI Training

The Seattle Times and Newsday filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft on September 5, 2026, accusing both companies of using their journalism without permission to train AI models. The complaint adds two more names to a rapidly growing list of publishers pursuing similar claims in court.

The lawsuit alleges that ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot can reproduce passages lifted directly from the papers' reporting when prompted by users. That claim mirrors arguments made in earlier suits from The New York Times, Ziff Davis, Merriam-Webster, and Encyclopedia Britannica, all of which accuse OpenAI of copyright infringement tied to its training data.

The remedies sought go beyond damages. The Seattle Times and Newsday want courts to order the destruction of any copies of their work held by OpenAI and Microsoft, along with the training datasets and AI models built using that content. That request, if granted at scale, would force changes to how the underlying models are trained or deployed, not just how they're licensed.

A crowded legal front

This case lands amid a much broader wave of litigation. Nearly 400 local newspapers have now sued OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing that AI chatbots divert readers away from original sources and erode subscription revenue that local journalism depends on.

The dispute carries an added wrinkle: Microsoft and OpenAI have previously funded journalism projects and fellowships at The Seattle Times, making the paper both a past collaborator and now a plaintiff. That overlap has not gone unnoticed by Microsoft.

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was "surprised by the lawsuit" but remains "always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute."

Neither OpenAI nor Microsoft has publicly detailed a counter-argument specific to this filing, though both companies have generally defended their training practices as fair use in prior cases. With regional and national outlets now aligned in similar suits, courts may soon face pressure to issue a more unified ruling on how AI companies can use copyrighted news content, rather than litigating the question outlet by outlet.

For now, the case adds to a legal backlog that could shape licensing norms across the news industry, particularly for smaller local papers that lack the resources of national mastheads but are joining the fight in numbers.