“Two American media outlets sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of violating copyright laws through AI training.”
September 5, 2026: Two media outlets sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The case was filed with the New York Southern District Federal Court.
On September 5, 2026, the US newspapers The Seattle Times and News Daily filed a lawsuit in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of using their news articles for AI model training without authorization. The media cited that the companies directly extracted content with paywalls, and their generated responses often repeated the original text, thereby reducing the need for readers to visit the official websites. OpenAI responded that its models were trained based on public data and complied with the principle of fair use; Microsoft stated that the lawsuit came as a surprise but recognized the value of local news and was willing to seek solutions. Currently, the plaintiffs are seeking a court order to destroy infringing copies, datasets containing relevant content, and AI models. This lawsuit joins nearly 400 similar lawsuits filed by local newspapers against the two companies recently.
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September 5, 2026: Two media outlets sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The case was filed with the New York Southern District Federal Court.
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2026-09-05
Two media outlets sued OpenAI and Microsoft
The Seattle Times and News Daily filed a lawsuit with the New York Southern District Federal Court, accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of unauthorized use of news reports with paywalls for AI model training. OpenAI responded that the use was based on public data and in compliance with fair use principles, while Microsoft stated that the lawsuit was unexpected but recognized the local news value.
Two American media outlets have sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of unauthorizedly using news reports with paid wall content for training ChatGPT, Copilot, and Bing AI. The lawsuit has been filed with the U.S. Southern District Court in New York. The complaint states that the companies directly integrated the articles into their training datasets, and the generated content could reproduce original paragraphs with highly similar rewriting, thereby reducing the need for readers to visit the official websites or subscribe. An OpenAI spokesperson responded that the models were trained on public data and complied with the principle of fair use, without commenting on specific allegations; a Microsoft spokesperson said the lawsuit was unexpected, but recognized the importance of local news and expressed willingness to seek solutions. Currently, the Seattle Times and the News Daily are seeking a court order requiring the companies to destroy infringing copies, datasets containing such content, and AI models.
The Seattle Times and the News Daily have sued Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement, claiming that these two artificial intelligence giants used their content without permission.
The Seattle Times and News Daily have sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The two media outlets alleged that OpenAI used their news reports as training data for AI models without authorization, and frequently rephrased relevant passages in user queries. Microsoft was named as a defendant in this lawsuit because its Copilot is built using OpenAI technology. This case joins nearly 400 local newspapers that have recently sued the two companies, following lawsuits filed by organizations such as the New York Times, Ziff Davis, Merrell-Webster, and Encyclopedia Britannica.