OpenAI and Microsoft are facing another copyright lawsuit from the news industry after The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a federal lawsuit alleging that their journalism was copied without permission to train artificial intelligence systems.
The lawsuit was filed on Friday, September 4, 2026, according to Reuters reporting published September 5. The case adds two major regional publishers to the growing legal fight over whether AI companies can use copyrighted journalism to develop commercial AI systems without obtaining licenses or paying publishers.
The dispute comes at a particularly important moment for the AI industry. The U.S. government has just argued in a separate copyright case that training AI models on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use, while publishers continue to argue that AI companies are commercially exploiting journalism without permission or compensation.
Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft
The lawsuit names OpenAI and Microsoft as defendants.
The Seattle Times and Newsday allege that the companies copied their journalistic content without authorization for use in training AI systems.
The central dispute is therefore not simply about whether ChatGPT can quote a newspaper article.
It goes much deeper.
The publishers are challenging the use of their underlying journalism as part of the massive datasets used to develop AI models.
AI companies, meanwhile, have argued that training models on publicly available material can constitute a transformative use protected by copyright law.
That legal question remains unsettled, and the outcome could have consequences far beyond these two newspapers.
Why the Lawsuit Matters
News organizations spend substantial amounts of money producing original reporting.
Journalists investigate stories, interview sources, verify information, analyze documents and publish articles that can take hours, days or even months to produce.
AI companies use enormous quantities of text to develop large language models capable of generating answers to users’ questions.
That creates a fundamental economic question:
Can an AI company use copyrighted journalism to build a commercial system without obtaining permission from the publisher?
The Seattle Times and Newsday lawsuit is another attempt to have a court answer that question.
If publishers prevail in cases like this, AI companies could face greater pressure to license training material.
If AI companies prevail, publishers may have fewer legal tools to demand payment for the use of publicly accessible content in AI training.
This Is Part of a Much Larger AI Copyright Battle
The lawsuit does not exist in isolation.
OpenAI and Microsoft have already faced copyright litigation from multiple publishers, writers and other rights holders.
One of the most closely watched cases involves The New York Times, which sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023.
The Times alleges that the companies used millions of its articles without authorization to build AI products and that those products can compete with the newspaper by providing information directly to users.
Other publishers and creators have brought their own cases involving AI training and generated outputs.
The growing number of lawsuits means courts are gradually becoming the battleground where the boundaries between AI development and copyright protection are being defined.
The Seattle Times and Newsday Have an Unusual History With OpenAI
The latest lawsuit is particularly notable because both publishers previously participated in an AI initiative backed by OpenAI and Microsoft.
In 2024, OpenAI and Microsoft partnered with the Lenfest Institute of Journalism on a $10 million program supporting AI experimentation in local newsrooms.
Newsday and The Seattle Times were among the participating organizations.
The program provided funding and technology credits for newsrooms to experiment with AI applications.
The Seattle Times planned to use AI in areas including advertising, sales support and analytics, while Newsday worked on AI applications involving public-data summarization and aggregation.
That history makes the new lawsuit especially striking.
Organizations that previously explored ways to use OpenAI technology are now challenging the company’s use of their journalism in AI development.
It highlights how complicated the relationship between publishers and AI companies has become.
The Core Issue: AI Training and Copyright
Large language models are trained using huge quantities of text.
During training, models process information and learn statistical relationships between words, concepts and patterns.
The legal disagreement is over whether copyrighted works can be included in that training process without permission.
OpenAI and other AI companies have argued that training is transformative because the model does not simply function as a digital archive of the original works.
Publishers have countered that the economic value of their journalism is being used to build commercial products without compensation.
The difference between those positions is at the heart of the current AI copyright debate.
AI Training Is Different From Simply Reading an Article
One important distinction is between accessing an article and using it as training material.
A person reading a newspaper article generally consumes that work.
An AI developer may collect enormous quantities of articles and process them as part of building a model.
The question for courts is whether that second use is sufficiently transformative to qualify for fair-use protection.
There is no simple rule that says every use of publicly available online material is automatically legal.
At the same time, copyright law does permit certain unauthorized uses of copyrighted material under the fair-use doctrine.
Courts therefore have to examine the specific circumstances of each dispute.
The New York Times Case Could Influence This Lawsuit
The latest lawsuit arrives as another major OpenAI copyright case reaches an important stage.
The Trump administration recently filed a statement supporting OpenAI and Microsoft in their copyright fight with The New York Times.
The Justice Department argued that training AI models on copyrighted works can qualify as fair use and that restricting such activity could hurt U.S. technological development, economic growth and national-security interests.
The government is not a party to the New York Times lawsuit.
Its filing is instead a legal statement expressing the administration’s position on the broader copyright question.
That position could become significant if courts ultimately have to balance copyright protection against the economic and technological benefits of AI development.
Publishers Disagree With the Government’s Position
The New York Times has strongly rejected the government’s argument.
The newspaper says AI companies are benefiting commercially from journalism that publishers spend substantial resources producing.
Its position is that AI companies should negotiate licenses and pay for the content rather than treating the material as freely available training input.
That disagreement represents the two competing visions for the future of AI-generated information.
The AI Industry’s Position
AI companies generally argue that training on large collections of publicly available information is a transformative technological process.
They contend that requiring permission for every individual piece of training data could make AI development impractical and create significant barriers for smaller AI companies.
The Publishers’ Position
Publishers argue that journalism is not simply free raw material.
They invest in reporters, editors, photographers, investigative teams, technology and distribution.
If AI systems can use that work to answer users’ questions without sending those users to the original publisher, publishers argue that AI can potentially undermine the business model that finances journalism.
Why Microsoft Is Also Named
Microsoft’s involvement is important because the company has a deep commercial relationship with OpenAI and incorporates OpenAI technology into products such as Copilot.
The Seattle Times and Newsday therefore brought the lawsuit against both companies rather than treating OpenAI as the only party responsible for the alleged copyright use.
The broader OpenAI-Microsoft relationship has already made Microsoft a defendant in other AI copyright litigation, including the New York Times case.
The new case could therefore add another legal front for both companies as they defend their approach to AI training.
The Bigger Problem for Publishers Is Not Just Training
Copyright disputes increasingly involve more than the initial training process.
Publishers are also concerned about what happens after an AI model has been trained.
A user may ask an AI system for a summary of a recent article.
If the system provides a useful answer without requiring the user to visit the publisher’s website, the publisher could potentially lose traffic.
That matters because digital publishers often rely on website visits for advertising, subscriptions, memberships and other revenue.
The concern is therefore about the entire information ecosystem:
Who creates the information, who trains the AI, who answers the user’s question and who gets paid?
Licensing Deals Offer an Alternative
Not every publisher has chosen litigation.
Some major media companies have instead negotiated licensing agreements with OpenAI.
For example, OpenAI has announced partnerships with news organizations that allow the company to use publisher content under negotiated arrangements.
This creates another possible path for the industry.
Instead of asking courts to decide whether unlicensed training is legal, publishers and AI companies can negotiate terms covering:
- Content access
- Training rights
- Attribution
- Links
- Revenue
- Data restrictions
- AI-generated summaries
- Archival material
The challenge is determining whether such agreements can become economically meaningful for publishers of all sizes.
Why Local Journalism Could Be Especially Vulnerable
The Seattle Times and Newsday represent major regional journalism organizations.
Local newspapers operate differently from global media companies.
They may have smaller technology teams and fewer financial resources while still producing reporting that is highly valuable to their communities.
AI systems can potentially summarize local government meetings, court cases, investigations, sports coverage and breaking news without requiring users to visit the original publication.
That creates a difficult economic problem.
If AI answers become the primary way people consume local information, publishers could lose some of the audience and revenue that support the production of that information.
At the same time, AI companies need high-quality local information because it provides valuable context that may not be available elsewhere.
The two industries therefore have a complicated dependency on each other.
OpenAI’s Relationship With News Publishers Is Becoming More Complicated
OpenAI has pursued both partnerships and defended itself against lawsuits.
The company has supported AI experimentation in newsrooms while also facing allegations that its AI systems were developed using publishers’ copyrighted work without sufficient authorization.
The Seattle Times and Newsday case demonstrates that financial partnerships do not necessarily eliminate underlying disagreements about copyright.
A publisher can see value in AI technology while still objecting to how its content is used to train commercial models.
That distinction could become increasingly important as publishers decide whether to license content, block automated access or pursue litigation.
What Could Happen Next?
The lawsuit is still at an early stage.
OpenAI and Microsoft will have opportunities to respond to the allegations and potentially challenge the claims.
The court will eventually have to consider questions surrounding copyright ownership, training practices, fair use and the alleged economic impact of the defendants’ conduct.
Several outcomes are possible.
The case could proceed through lengthy discovery and litigation.
The parties could negotiate a settlement or licensing agreement.
Or the court could issue rulings that clarify how copyright law applies to AI training.
Because multiple AI copyright lawsuits are moving through U.S. courts, decisions in one case could influence arguments in others.
What This Means for the AI Industry
The stakes extend well beyond OpenAI.
Companies developing large language models need enormous quantities of high-quality information.
If courts establish that copyrighted material generally requires licensing for AI training, model developers could face significantly higher data costs.
That could favor large companies capable of negotiating major licensing agreements while creating challenges for smaller AI startups.
On the other hand, a broad ruling in favor of AI companies could make it much harder for publishers and other creators to demand compensation for training uses.
The legal outcome could therefore influence the economics of the entire AI ecosystem.
What This Means for Journalism
For publishers, the question is ultimately about sustainability.
Professional journalism requires money.
Reporters need salaries, editors need resources, investigative projects require time and legal support, and local newsrooms need infrastructure.
If AI systems increasingly become the interface through which people access information, publishers fear that the economic value could shift away from the organizations producing original reporting.
That is why copyright litigation has become such an important part of the media industry’s response to generative AI.
The publishers are not simply asking whether AI can read their articles.
They are asking whether AI companies can build businesses from journalism without sharing enough of the economic value created by that journalism.
Final Takeaway
The new lawsuit from The Seattle Times and Newsday against OpenAI and Microsoft adds another major case to the rapidly expanding legal battle over AI training and copyrighted journalism.
The publishers allege that their journalism was copied without permission to train AI systems.
OpenAI and other AI developers have maintained that training AI on publicly available material can qualify as fair use, while publishers argue that commercial AI systems should not be built on copyrighted work without authorization or compensation.
The timing makes the case even more significant.
The U.S. government has recently backed OpenAI’s fair-use position in the separate New York Times litigation, while more publishers continue challenging the industry’s approach in court.
For now, there is no final nationwide answer to the central question.
But as more cases move forward, U.S. courts are gradually being asked to define one of the most important rules of the generative-AI era:
Who owns the economic value created when artificial intelligence learns from human-created information?
Read More:- OpenAI Commits $1 Billion to Defend Critical Infrastructure From AI Cyberattacks
FAQ
Why are The Seattle Times and Newsday suing OpenAI?
The publishers allege that OpenAI and Microsoft copied their journalism without permission to train AI systems, raising questions about copyright infringement and the use of news content for AI development.
Is Microsoft also being sued?
Yes. The lawsuit names both OpenAI and Microsoft as defendants.
When was the lawsuit filed?
The lawsuit was filed on Friday, September 4, 2026, according to Reuters reporting published September 5.
What is the main copyright issue?
The central issue is whether AI companies can use copyrighted journalism to train AI models without obtaining permission or paying publishers.
Does using publicly available content automatically make AI training legal?
No. Public availability does not automatically eliminate copyright protection. Whether a particular use qualifies as fair use depends on the circumstances and applicable law.
Is this OpenAI’s first copyright lawsuit from a newspaper?
No. OpenAI and Microsoft have already faced copyright litigation from other publishers, including The New York Times.
Have Seattle Times and Newsday worked with OpenAI before?
Yes. Both participated in a 2024 local-news AI initiative supported by OpenAI and Microsoft through the Lenfest Institute.
Could this lawsuit affect the wider AI industry?
Yes. Court decisions concerning AI training and copyright could influence licensing costs, data-access practices and how AI companies build future models.
