The Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright: damages and destruction of training sets sought
Two US newspapers, The Seattle Times Co. and Newsday, filed a copyright and trademark suit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on 4 September. The complaint says the companies used the papers' published content without permission or payment to
The Seattle Times Co. and Long Island's Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright and trademark infringement in federal court in the Southern District of New York on Friday, 4 September. The Seattle Times' own report says the papers accuse the companies of using their published work, without consent or compensation, to train and run large language models. They seek damages and the destruction of every AI training set containing their content.
What the complaint claims
The complaint says the companies scraped the papers' websites, paywalled content included, and put the articles into datasets used to train and run ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI features. The models, it says, reproduce their journalism often verbatim, and OpenAI diluted the papers' brands with falsely attributed content. Per the filing, search referral traffic to mid-sized publishers fell 47 percent year over year last December.
What the parties say
Seattle Times president and CEO Alan Fisco said the decision was not easy, but the paper must protect content it spends millions of dollars a year producing from use without consent or compensation. Innovation, he said, must not come at the expense of its business model.
A Microsoft spokesperson, by email on 4 September, said the suit was a surprise but values the paper's importance to its region and is willing to seek a resolution. OpenAI's spokesperson said the models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use, helping hundreds of millions of people improve their daily lives.
Publisher lawsuits
The Seattle Times' report lists a chain of publisher lawsuits: The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft three years ago, Alden Global Capital's newspapers filed two years ago, and 35 publishers representing more than 400 local newspapers filed last year.
For the corporate reader
For content producers in Turkey, in media, publishing or education, whether their content went into a model, and whether to license it, will be answered by court rulings. The fair use defense the companies rely on is specific to US law; Turkey's FSEK equivalent works differently.
Sources
- Primary source: The Seattle Times (via Spokesman-Review), 4 September: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/sep/04/the-seattle-times-sues-openai-microsoft-over-copyr/
- Engadget, 5 September: https://www.engadget.com/2251707/seattle-times-newsday-sue-openai-microsoft-for-copyright-infringement/
- TechCrunch, 5 September: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/05/seattle-times-and-newsday-are-the-latest-publications-to-sue-openai-and-microsoft/
