Seattle Times, Newsday Sue OpenAI, Microsoft Over Copyright Claims

The parent companies of the Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that the tech companies violated copyrights by training on content from the two news organizations.

“AI products like ChatGPT and CoPilot are touted as producers of content, but in fact they are rapacious consumers, devouring human-authored content and delivering back to the world copies and derivative imitations of that same original content they consumed to achieve their commercial objectives,” lawyers for the news companies wrote in a court filing.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, echoes others by news publishers including the New York Times, which sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023.

The Seattle Times receives some charitable funding from both Microsoft and OpenAI, the newspaper said in an article about its lawsuit. The article cited a Microsoft spokesperson saying the company was surprised by the lawsuit and willing to explore solutions, and a spokesperson for OpenAI saying its models are trained on publicly available data and empower human creativity and research.