Two U.S. newspapers have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging unauthorized use of their journalistic content to train artificial intelligence systems. The Seattle Times and Newsday initiated the legal action on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accusing the technology companies of scraping their websites, including paywalled material, without permission.

The complaint states that OpenAI and Microsoft incorporated articles from the newspapers into datasets that power various AI products, such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing’s AI functionalities. According to the newspapers, these AI tools can generate text that either reproduces exact passages or closely paraphrases their reporting, potentially reducing the need for users to visit the original sites or subscribe to the publications.

Seattle Times president and CEO Alan Fisco emphasized the significant investment the newspapers make in producing original content and expressed the need to protect it from unconsented use. "We feel strongly that we must defend our content – which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce – from being used without our consent or compensation," he wrote in a message to employees.

OpenAI, headquartered in San Francisco, responded by stating that its AI models are trained on publicly available data and assert that their use complies with fair use principles. The company declined to comment specifically on the legal claims. Microsoft, based near Seattle, expressed surprise at the lawsuit but acknowledged the importance of local journalism. In a statement sent via email, Microsoft said it was open to discussions aimed at resolving such disputes.

The lawsuit seeks a court order that would require the destruction of any copies of the newspapers’ work embedded in training datasets or AI models developed by the defendants. This case follows a similar lawsuit filed by The New York Times in 2023, which also accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using newspaper articles without authorization for AI training purposes.

The evolving legal challenges reflect growing tensions between traditional news organizations and technology firms over the use of copyrighted content in AI development, raising complex questions about intellectual property rights and fair use in the digital age.