Seattle Times and Newsday file lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft

Two additional news organizations have filed lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the companies used their copyrighted journalism to train large‑language‑model systems without permission. The filings, submitted this week in federal court, join earlier actions brought by other media outlets that contend the AI developers’ data‑gathering practices infringe on the owners’ exclusive rights and deprive them of revenue from downstream uses of their content. Plaintiffs assert that excerpts from their articles appear in the responses generated by ChatGPT and other AI tools, and they seek injunctions, damages, and a court order requiring OpenAI and Microsoft to disclose the specific materials incorporated into the models.

The complaints allege violations of the Copyright Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and state unfair‑competition statutes, arguing that the defendants’ “scraping” of publicly available news sites exceeds permissible fair‑use limits. Both lawsuits request that the defendants halt further training on the plaintiffs’ works and that any AI outputs derived from those texts be labeled to indicate their source. OpenAI and Microsoft have declined to comment on the pending litigation, while legal experts note that the cases could shape the future of AI development and the balance between innovation and intellectual‑property protection. The courts’ rulings are expected to set precedents for how copyrighted material may be used in training generative AI systems.