Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft over AI training

MUMBAI: The news is making its way to court, and this time the source is the newsroom itself. The Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft in federal court, alleging that the technology giants used their journalism without permission to train and operate artificial intelligence systems.

The lawsuit, filed on Friday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, claims the companies scraped content from the newspapers’ websites, including articles protected by paywalls, and incorporated the material into datasets used for AI products such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI features.

The two newspapers, based in Seattle and Long Island, New York, argue that the AI systems can reproduce portions of their reporting or closely rework their articles. Their concern is not merely about copied words appearing on a screen, but about what happens when readers get the information from an AI service instead of visiting the publication or paying for a subscription.

Seattle Times president and CEO Alan Fisco said the newspaper needs to protect journalism that costs millions of dollars each year to produce. His comments were made in a message to employees, according to the newspaper.

OpenAI, meanwhile, said its models are trained using publicly available data and operate on fair-use principles. A company spokesperson did not specifically comment on the lawsuit.

Microsoft said it was surprised by the legal action but acknowledged the importance of local journalism. The company also said it remained willing to discuss potential solutions to disputes of this kind.

The newspapers are seeking a court order requiring the defendants to destroy copies of their works, as well as training datasets or AI models containing their material.

The case adds another chapter to the increasingly crowded legal battle between publishers and AI companies. In 2023, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that millions of its articles had been used without permission to train OpenAI’s chatbot. That case remains ongoing.

Other copyright lawsuits have also been brought against OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta by rights holders over the use of their material in AI systems.

For publishers, the fight boils down to a particularly modern question: if an AI system can turn years of paid-for reporting into an answer without sending readers back to the newsroom, who gets to keep the credit and the revenue?