The Seattle Times and Newsday are suing OpenAI and Microsoft for training AI on their journalism without payment. Fair use that powers innovation, or strip-mining the news?
The papers call it "a snake eating its own tail". They join The New York Times and a growing list of publishers in copyright suits against OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing generative AI could destroy the very organisations whose content trains it.
What happened
On September 4-5, 2026, the Seattle Times and Newsday filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the companies used their journalism to train AI models without permission or compensation. The papers described AI products as 'rapacious consumers, devouring human-authored content and delivering back to the world copies and derivative imitations.' The suit follows the pattern set by The New York Times' 2023 lawsuit against the same companies, adding to a growing wave of publisher litigation. Microsoft said it was 'surprised by the lawsuit' but open to 'exploring solutions.'
Why people disagree
Publishers argue that AI companies built enormously valuable, revenue-generating products by scraping copyrighted journalism at scale without licenses, undercutting the same outlets that produced the training data and threatening the economic model that funds reporting in the first place. OpenAI and Microsoft, and their supporters, argue that training on publicly available text to build a general-purpose model is transformative fair use analogous to how a human learns from reading, and that requiring licenses for all training data would be unworkable and could stifle AI development and competition against less scrupulous international rivals.
What's still unclear
The core legal question — whether training generative AI on copyrighted text is fair use — is still unresolved in U.S. courts, with the outcome of the original New York Times case and similar suits likely to set precedent for this one. Also unclear is what a settlement or licensing framework would even look like at industry scale, and how damages would be calculated if publishers prevail.
Sources
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