News-Seattle-Times-Newsday-OpenAI-Microsoft-Copyright-Lawsuit-2026
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September 4, 2026 — The Seattle Times Company and Newsday LLC sued OpenAI and Microsoft in federal court in Manhattan, alleging that the companies copied their journalism without permission to train and operate generative-AI products.[1]
The complaint alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped hundreds of thousands of articles, bypassed paywalls, removed or altered copyright-management information, and used the resulting copies in datasets for model training, fine-tuning, retrieval, and output generation.[1] The publishers assert copyright, DMCA, and trademark-dilution claims and demand a jury trial.[1]
The complaint cites examples of alleged reproduction, including an 88-word verbatim passage from The Seattle Times’ Boeing 737 MAX reporting generated after a prompt supplied the article’s headline and URL.[1] The publishers seek damages, an injunction, and the impoundment or destruction of copies, training datasets, and models incorporating their works or derivatives.[1]
Significance
The filing adds The Seattle Times and Newsday to a growing set of news publishers challenging the use of copyrighted journalism in generative-AI systems.[1]