Local newspapers sue OpenAI and Microsoft over use of paywalled articles

OpenAI and Microsoft face another lawsuit from news organizations the Seattle Times and Newsday, which accuse the tech giants of using their sites to train AI without permission.

The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that the companies scraped paywalled content and added it to training datasets used for ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and the new AI-powered Bing.

The chatbots were able to reproduce entire passages and closely paraphrase reporters’ work, the publishers claim. The lawsuit demands that the tech companies destroy any existing copies of the published material, as well as training datasets or AI models that incorporate it, Reuters reported.

“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,” wrote Seattle Times president and CEO ​Alan Fisco in a message to employees.

OpenAI said in a response to the press that the company only uses publicly available materials grounded in fair use for model training. Microsoft said it was surprised by the lawsuit, but was willing to “sit down and explore solutions” with the publishers.

The AI developer and its collaborator, Microsoft, have faced several court battles over its training data and alleged copyright infringement, including an ongoing lawsuit with the New York Times and a cohort of other publishers. The Times has argued that the company’s products compete with the news outlet by reproducing its work without appropriately transforming it under existing fair use protections.

Last week, the Trump administration filed a Statement of Interest (SOI) in the case, with the Department of Justice (DOJ) writing that a decision siding with the New York Times would be a hit to local newsrooms and independent journalism. The DOJ argued that AI can be harnessed by small publishers to stay competitive with mainstream news outlets.

The brief also claims a Times win would “threaten national security” by stalling AI advancement and giving foreign competitors an edge. The administration has used this argument to attempt to thwart litigation against AI data centers, as well.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.