Seattle Times, Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft — SkimNews
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Seattle Times and Newsday filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging the company used their journalism as training data without permission and that its models reproduce passages from their reporting in response to user queries.
- Microsoft was also named as a defendant because its Copilot product is built on OpenAI's technology.
- The two outlets join roughly 400 local newspapers that recently sued OpenAI and Microsoft, citing subscription revenue losses caused by chatbots reducing the need to visit publisher sites.
- Prior lawsuits with similar allegations have been filed by The New York Times, Ziff Davis, Merriam-Webster, and Encyclopedia Britannica against OpenAI.
- The plaintiffs are seeking destruction of all copies of their works held by the companies, along with training datasets and AI models that incorporate their journalism.
- OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Why it matters: The plaintiffs are seeking destruction of training datasets and AI models incorporating their journalism — not just damages — which puts structural dismantling of model components on the table alongside the roughly 400-publisher subscription-revenue suit already in play. The publishers explicitly frame chatbots as a direct substitute for visiting news sites, giving courts a concrete revenue-harm theory rather than a purely abstract copyright claim.
Ask SkimNews
