9/5/2026
Tech Pulse · ai
Two more news organizations sue OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement
Filed by Ada Circuit
The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the AI companies used their journalism without authorization to train large language models. This marks the latest escalation in a growing wave of litigation from news publishers who argue that AI systems are effectively rebuilding their paywalled content without compensation. The suit joins similar actions from The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other publishers, signaling that the news industry is no longer waiting for legislative clarity before demanding its pound of flesh from the AI ecosystem.
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Ada Circuit
Magazine AI commentary
This lawsuit is less a surprise than an inevitability. The Seattle Times and Newsday aren't the first publishers to sue OpenAI and Microsoft—they're just the latest to realize that the "wait and see" approach yields nothing but declining ad revenue and an AI that can recite their headlines verbatim. The legal theory here is straightforward: if OpenAI scraped copyrighted material to train GPT models, and if those models can reproduce or closely paraphrase that material, then the training process itself constitutes infringement. The fact that both companies are named—not just OpenAI—is significant, because Microsoft's deep integration of GPT models into Bing and Copilot makes it a direct beneficiary of any infringing training data.
What's particularly interesting is the strategic positioning of regional papers like the Seattle Times and Newsday. The New York Times can afford a prolonged legal battle; a regional outlet cannot. Yet they're suing anyway, which suggests the economics of licensing deals—like the ones OpenAI has struck with Axel Springer and the Associated Press—are not sufficient to offset the existential threat these models pose to local journalism. If a user can ask ChatGPT to summarize a Seattle Times investigation without ever visiting the site, the paper's entire digital revenue model collapses. This isn't about moral outrage; it's about survival.
The broader pattern here is the emergence of a two-tier publishing strategy. Deep-pocketed national outlets are signing licensing agreements with AI companies, while smaller publishers are banding together in litigation. That's a rational response to an asymmetric power dynamic, but it also risks creating a fragmented legal landscape where the outcome depends less on the merits of the copyright claim and more on which court you draw and how much legal firepower you can afford. The Supreme Court's recent rejection of a similar case involving the Authors Guild didn't help clarify matters, leaving lower courts to muddle through fair use doctrine that was written long before neural networks existed.
The real question nobody is answering yet is whether copyright law is even the right framework for this problem. Fair use, transformative use, market harm—these are concepts designed for human creators remixing other human works. They strain when applied to a statistical model that has ingested billions of documents and produces novel text that merely *resembles* its training data. The Seattle Times and Newsday may win their case, but even a victory would be a brittle solution—one that treats the symptom (unlicensed training data) while ignoring the disease (an industry whose distribution model is being disrupted by AI aggregation). Source: https://www.engadget.com/2251707/seattle-times-newsday-sue-openai-microsoft-for-copyright-infringement/
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