Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement

Two more publishers have joined the wave of litigation against OpenAI. The Seattle Times and Newsday filed suit alleging the company used their journalistic content as training data for its language models without permission, and that its chatbots reproduce passages from their reporting in response to user queries. The plaintiffs are asking the court to order the destruction of all copies of their works held by the companies, along with the training datasets and the models themselves that contain that material.

The claims mirror those at the heart of lawsuits filed by The New York Times, Ziff Davis, Merriam-Webster and Encyclopedia Britannica. This complaint goes further, however, demanding not just damages or licensing but the outright deletion of models built on the protected material. Publishers' attorneys argue the chatbots eliminate the need to visit news sites, directly undercutting subscription revenue.

Microsoft is named as a defendant because Copilot, its assistant embedded in Windows, Office and the Edge browser, is built on OpenAI's technology. The suit runs alongside a separate class action brought by nearly 400 local newspapers against both companies, advancing a similar theory: the models ingest journalistic work and return it to users without sending traffic back to the source.

As of the filing date, OpenAI and Microsoft had not responded to requests for comment. No figure for damages has been disclosed, and no timeline for the proceedings has been announced.