Source: Unite.AI
The Seattle Times Co. and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on September 4, 2026, filing a federal copyright and trademark complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that accuses the companies of using the newspapers’ published work to train and operate AI products without permission or payment. The Seattle Times reported on its own filing on Friday, and Newsday published its own account describing a 38-page complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan.
Allegations in the Complaint
According to Newsday, the complaint alleges that the companies’ AI models violate the news organizations’ copyrights by ingesting their journalism and reproducing it, often verbatim, without compensation. The complaint states that generative AI trained on “painstakingly researched, expensive-to-produce content threatens to destroy the very news organizations by competing directly with them through AI-generated substitutive content,” and that “there is no justification for Defendants’ wholesale taking and use of Plaintiffs’ content without payment or permission.”
The two outlets also accused OpenAI of diluting their trademarks by generating fabricated content that was falsely attributed to The Seattle Times and Newsday, according to The Seattle Times. Attorneys for the newspapers told the court the AI models are causing substantial harm to media businesses, citing industry data showing that search referral traffic to midsize publishers declined by 47 percent year over year in December 2025.
The suit seeks an unspecified amount of damages as well as court orders for the “impoundment and/or destruction” of datasets and AI models that include the outlets’ articles, Newsday reported. The Seattle Times described the requested relief as damages and the destruction of all AI training sets that used the plaintiffs’ published work.
Statements From the Newsrooms
Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco announced the suit in an email to employees on September 4, 2026, calling it “not an easy decision.” He wrote that the company must defend its content, which it spends millions of dollars a year to produce, from being used without consent or compensation. Fisco said the lawsuit was “not about impeding AI innovation” but about making sure innovation does not come at the expense of the newspaper’s business model.
Newsday spokesperson Tara Rogers said in a statement that while both Newsday and The Seattle Times support responsible AI innovation, it is imperative to protect the significant investments the organizations have made in their content. Newsday and The Seattle Times are privately owned news organizations based on opposite sides of the country, in Long Island, New York, and Seattle.
Responses From OpenAI and Microsoft
A Microsoft spokesperson said in an emailed statement on September 4, 2026 that the company was surprised by the lawsuit, appreciates the importance of The Seattle Times to its region, and is always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute. An OpenAI spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company’s models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use, adding that this helps hundreds of millions of people improve their daily lives and delivers benefits such as empowering human creativity, science, and medical research.
Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI since 2019 and remains its primary cloud computing partner, and the two companies worked together to create the large language models behind ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot models. Microsoft said in April 2026 that it is still a major shareholder in OpenAI, though the partnership has been amended to grant OpenAI more independence.
Related Litigation and Government Filings
The complaint is similar to one The New York Times filed against OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, accusing the companies of using its stories to develop AI models. The companies have argued in that litigation that their technology trains on copyrighted work and generates new material in a manner permitted under copyright law’s fair use doctrine.
On September 1, 2026, the Justice Department filed a statement siding with the tech companies in that dispute, according to The Seattle Times. The filing argued that AI development is a matter of national interest and that a finding of copyright violation would stifle scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility; it also said the creative possibilities and potential benefits of AI models far outweigh any competitive harm from training on publishers’ content.
Other publishers have brought comparable claims. Daily newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital sued OpenAI in 2024, and a group of 35 publishers representing more than 400 community newspapers sued in 2025. Anthropic reached a $1.5 billion settlement last year with authors and publishers who accused it in a 2024 lawsuit of using copyrighted books to train its Claude models.
The Seattle Times disclosed that Microsoft Philanthropies underwrites some of its journalism projects and that it received a grant from The Lenfest Institute for Journalism for an AI fellowship program funded with $10 million from Microsoft and OpenAI. The newspaper said it does not use AI to generate stories.
