The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the pair of using their journalism without permission to train AI models. The two publishers join a lengthening line of news organisations making the same claim: that ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot were built in part on copyrighted reporting taken without a licence or payment.
Neither company has issued a public response to this specific filing. That silence is now standard practice: OpenAI and Microsoft have faced a string of near-identical suits from publishers over the past two years, and their answer in court has consistently been that training on published text falls under fair use, a defence that has yet to be tested to a final verdict against a major outlet.
What the Seattle Times and Newsday are alleging
The core of the complaint mirrors earlier publisher suits: that the companies scraped and reproduced copyrighted articles as training data without a licensing agreement, then built commercial products on top of that material. TechCrunch describes the pair as the latest publications to sue OpenAI and Microsoft, a framing that says something on its own: this is no longer a novel legal theory being tested by one or two plaintiffs, it is a recurring filing that keeps adding names.
What is missing from both outlets’ reporting, and from the material available at time of writing, is any detail on damages sought or the specific articles named in the complaint. Until the filing itself becomes public in more detail, the claim reads at the same level of generality as the suits that preceded it.
Where this fits with the rest of the OpenAI legal picture
We covered the other side of this fight on 2026-09-03, when the Trump administration backed OpenAI in the New York Times lawsuit, a case that remains the highest-profile of the group. What has changed since then is the roster of plaintiffs, not the government’s position: the Seattle Times and Newsday are new names on the docket, but the political backing OpenAI secured in the New York Times matter does not automatically extend to these new complaints, since each is a separate filing that will need its own ruling on fair use.
That distinction matters for anyone tracking where this is headed. A favourable outcome for OpenAI in the New York Times case would be persuasive precedent, not binding law, in the Seattle Times and Newsday suits. Publishers appear to be betting that filing separately, rather than waiting on one bellwether case, keeps pressure on regardless of how the Times matter resolves.
What to watch next
The near-term question is whether the Seattle Times and Newsday suits get consolidated with existing publisher litigation against OpenAI and Microsoft, or proceed on their own timeline. Also worth tracking: whether the fair-use defence that underpins OpenAI’s position in the New York Times case holds up once a court actually rules on the merits, since that ruling, whichever way it goes, will shape how every subsequent publisher suit against the company is argued.
