Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over Use of Their Articles in AI Training
Technology & SocietyWell-covered
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The Facts
- The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday, Sept. 4, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
- The complaint alleges the two companies scraped the newspapers' websites, including articles behind paywalls.
- The suit says the scraped articles were incorporated into datasets used to train and operate ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI features.
- The lawsuit alleges the companies scraped hundreds of thousands of Seattle Times and Newsday articles.
- The newspapers allege the AI products can reproduce passages from their reporting and closely paraphrase their articles.
- The papers say the AI-generated answers reduce users' need to visit their websites or buy subscriptions.
- The complaint describes generative AI trained on news content as "a snake eating its own tail" that threatens to destroy news organizations.
- Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco told employees the company must defend content it spends millions of dollars a year to produce.
Context
What are the newspapers asking the court for?
The suit seeks financial damages and the destruction of any training datasets and models built with the newspapers' content GeekWire. The 38-page complaint, filed in federal court in Manhattan, alleges infringement of both the news organizations' copyrights and their trademarks Newsday.
Is this the first case of its kind against OpenAI and Microsoft?
No. The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner and investor Microsoft in 2023 in Manhattan federal court, arguing that training chatbots on its content breaches copyright protections TechCrunch,Yahoo. TechCrunch describes the Seattle Times and Newsday as the latest publications to bring such a claim TechCrunch.
What legal question is unresolved?
The central dispute is whether training AI models on copyrighted material qualifies as fair use, the doctrine that allows unlicensed use of copyrighted work in certain circumstances Yahoo. In the pending New York Times case, the Justice Department urged the judge to side with OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing AI companies should be allowed to train on the newspaper's material Yahoo.
Where Left and Right agree, and where they split
Left and right largely agree on this one.
- Where Left and Right agree
- Both read the scraping of hundreds of thousands of articles, paywalled ones included, as something OpenAI and Microsoft must pay for — licensing and compensation, not goodwill.
- Where Left and Right differ in emphasis
- Both put the bill on the AI firms: one because subscriptions fund the reporting labor, the other because content built at real expense is owned property.
- Why they won’t converge
- The divide is about values, not facts: one side treats journalism as paid labor whose funding society must guarantee through licensing, the other as private property whose owner is simply owed restitution — remedies that diverge even when the scraping is conceded.
How left and right read it
Reporting is paid labor, and someone has to fund it. That is why it matters that hundreds of thousands of articles — including work locked behind paywalls readers were asked to buy — were allegedly scraped into datasets powering ChatGPT, Copilot and Bing, because products that reproduce passages and closely paraphrase the reporting cut the subscriptions and site visits that pay for it. A newsroom spending millions a year to produce that work should not have to subsidize the systems the complaint calls a snake eating its own tail. Compensation and licensing are the floor, not a favor.
Property built at real expense belongs to whoever bore it, whatever the size of the party helping itself. That is the stake when hundreds of thousands of articles, paywalled ones included, are pulled into the datasets running ChatGPT, Copilot and Bing, whose answers reproduce passages and shrink the need to subscribe. The papers spend millions a year on that work, so the burden sits with the firms that took it.
The receipts — all 27 sources
Wire services (2)
Independent coverage (25)
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