Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI Training Data

The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York against OpenAI and Microsoft. The publishers allege the companies scraped hundreds of thousands of articles, including paywalled content, to train large language models like ChatGPT and Copilot without permission or compensation. The complaint highlights an 88-word excerpt from Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Boeing 737 MAX that the AI systems reproduced in near-verbatim form. The plaintiffs are demanding monetary damages along with the destruction of the infringing datasets and the AI models built from their content. This action follows the New York Times suit from December 2023 and a massive coalition of roughly 400 local newspapers that filed a similar action in June 2026.