Seattle Times, Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft

The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Friday, September 4. The suit was filed in the Southern District of New York federal court. According to Reuters' report on the filing, it accuses both companies of scraping paywalled content to train ChatGPT, Copilot, and Bing without permission or payment. The case adds two more names to a growing list of publishers suing the companies, and it lands just three days after the U.S. Department of Justice sided with AI developers on fair use in that same court.

What the lawsuit alleges

The complaint accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of methodically scraping both newspapers' sites, bypassing paywalls to build the training data behind ChatGPT, Copilot, and Bing's AI features. Seattle Times CEO Alan Fisco told employees the decision followed a difficult internal debate.

"This was not an easy decision. However, we feel strongly that we must defend our content, which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce, from being used without our consent or compensation." Alan Fisco, President and CEO, The Seattle Times

Per Crypto Briefing's reporting, the complaint cites an 88-word excerpt from its Pulitzer-winning Boeing 737 MAX coverage, reproduced almost word for word by AI systems. It also cites a 47% year-over-year drop in referral traffic to midsize publishers in December 2025, and accuses OpenAI of trademark dilution for chatbot answers that fabricate and misattribute content to the two papers.

Microsoft says it wants to talk rather than fight.

"While we're surprised by the lawsuit, we appreciate the importance of the Seattle Times to our region and we're always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute." Microsoft spokesperson, in a statement to The Seattle Times

The DOJ waded in three days earlier

Three days earlier, on September 1, the Justice Department filed a 20-page brief in that same courthouse, its first-ever weigh-in on an AI copyright case. The brief argues that training large language models on copyrighted material is "extraordinarily transformative" fair use, and, according to the New York Times, associate attorney general Stanley Woodward Jr. called it a "historic statement of interest."

The filing carries no binding weight, though. Judge Sidney Stein still has to rule on fair use himself, since a statement of interest is just the executive branch weighing in, a mechanism created under U.S. Code title 28, section 517. That didn't stop pushback: a New York Times spokesperson called out the move publicly, arguing the government had picked a handful of "trillion-dollar A.I. companies" over the creators whose work trained them.

Could a court really order ChatGPT's training data destroyed?

The newspapers are asking for more than money. Alongside damages, according to The Silicon Review's coverage of the complaint, they want a court order requiring the "impoundment and/or destruction" of any copies of their work, training data, or AI models that incorporate it. That request sits at the center of a wider wave of AI copyright suits. Legal analysis of that broader litigation notes real obstacles to actually winning it. A trained model generally doesn't retain a recognizable copy of the works it learned from, because training changes how that data is represented inside the model. Training datasets, too, are often held separately from the finished model, and courts treat impoundment and destruction as discretionary remedies, not automatic ones.

If a judge actually granted the request, the companies would face a genuinely disruptive rebuild. That's why publishers keep asking for it even when the odds of winning it outright are long.

One of well over a dozen suits now

Publisher lawsuits against OpenAI now number well over a dozen. The New York Times filed a similar suit against both companies in 2023, and, according to Bloomberg Law, a coalition of roughly 400 local newspapers filed its own case in June 2026. Anthropic took a different path out of similar litigation last year, reaching a $1.5 billion settlement with a coalition of authors and publishers. Not every publisher is suing. Per Engadget's reporting, AP and Vox Media instead struck licensing partnerships with OpenAI rather than take the company to court.

The Seattle Times' own history with these two companies makes its position more complicated than most. Microsoft and OpenAI jointly funded a $10 million Lenfest Institute fellowship in 2024 that included the Seattle Times as a participant, the same companies it's now suing. For everyday users, what matters is simpler: whether a judge eventually forces the two companies to change what ChatGPT, Copilot, and Bing were trained on.