The Seattle Times and Newsday say OpenAI and Microsoft copied paid articles without permission. A court must now decide if the companies broke copyright law.
New to this? Read it in simple words
- The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on September 4. They say the companies copied paid news articles without permission.
- The newspapers claim hundreds of thousands of articles were copied. OpenAI and Microsoft had helped pay for an AI program that included both newspapers.
- The case shows a basic conflict. AI companies want lots of data, while news companies want payment and control.
- The court has not decided if these claims are true. The case may still take years.
- Copyright
- The legal right of creators to control who may copy and use their work.
- Paywall
- A system that lets people read an article only after they pay.
What the newspapers claim
The newspapers filed the case on September 4 in a federal court in New York. They say OpenAI and Microsoft copied hundreds of thousands of articles. Some articles were behind a paywall, which means readers normally had to pay to see them.
The newspapers also say ChatGPT sometimes repeated or closely rewrote their work after a user gave it a headline and a link. They want money for the claimed harm. They also ask the court to remove copies, data sets, or models that contain their work.
The publishers say their work was copied without permission and used instead of the original. The court has not decided the case.
Why the business relationship is unusual
OpenAI and Microsoft had helped pay for an AI program that included both newspapers. The program helped news teams test AI tools. However, joining an AI project does not automatically give another company permission to use every article in an archive.
News companies may use AI to save time or build new services. At the same time, an AI answer may give readers the information without sending them to the original news website. The newspaper may then lose visits, ads, or paid readers.
What the court must decide
The court may look at training and AI answers as separate questions. It must study how the companies got the articles, how they used them, what the AI can repeat, and whether the AI product harms the market for the original work.
Microsoft said it was surprised by the case and was ready to discuss solutions. The case may still take years. For now, it shows a basic conflict: AI companies want large amounts of data, while news companies want payment and control over their work.
Sources
Every fact in this story comes from the sources below. Open them to check our work.
- 1Primary source · September 4, 2026The Seattle Times Company et al. v. OpenAI Inc. et al., docket 1:2026cv07644 U.S. District Court via Justia
- 2Research · September 4, 2026Seattle Times sues Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging they trained their AI on its journalism GeekWire
- 3Research · September 5, 2026Seattle Times and Newsday are the latest publications to sue OpenAI and Microsoft TechCrunch
We checked the official court record for the people involved, the filing date, and the type of case. We used two independent reports for details about the claims and responses. We describe all claims as allegations because the court has not yet made a decision.