Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI

A deposition request landed on a Long Island conference table this week, and inside it sat a question that has rattled newsrooms from Manhattan to the Pacific Northwest: did the machines that now write headlines get their schooling from newspapers that never signed a permission slip?

The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a lawsuit on Tuesday, September 1, 2026, accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of training their flagship AI products on millions of copyrighted articles without consent or compensation. The complaint, reportedly filed in the U.S.

District Court for the Southern District of New York, names ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot as the products allegedly built atop a corpus of copyrighted journalism.

The Seattle Times, reportedly owned by the Blethen family and publishing since 1891, and Newsday, the Long Island daily reportedly owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong, are seeking damages and a court order blocking further ingestion of their archives.

Their argument is straightforward: large language models cannot reproduce paragraphs verbatim unless they were trained on the original text.

The Legal Foundation of the Times Newsday Suit

The plaintiffs allege that OpenAI and Microsoft ingested “millions” of articles spanning decades of reporting, ranging from local crime stories on Long Island to investigative pieces from the Emerald City. The complaint does not invent a new theory of harm; it borrows heavily from the landmark December 2023 suit filed by The New York Times, which has spent the past 32 months in discovery and is widely seen as the bellwether for media-versus-AI litigation.

Microsoft’s role is what makes this case distinctive. The Redmond giant holds a multibillion-dollar investment partnership with OpenAI, reported at approximately $13 billion total, making it a key backer of the company now facing the courtroom. That financial entanglement could expose Microsoft to direct liability even where OpenAI’s own conduct is murky. Lawyers for the publishers argue the partnership is not a firewall; it is a supply chain. > “Our reporters spent decades building trust with sources, verifying facts, and paying for the journalism that trained these systems.

Why Now, and Why These Two Papers

The timing is not accidental. The Seattle Times and Newsday both operate in markets where Microsoft and OpenAI have deployed Copilot and ChatGPT search features most aggressively. Both papers also maintain substantial archives that predate the public release of GPT-3.5 in 2022, meaning their content was almost certainly available when OpenAI assembled its earliest training sets.

The plaintiffs are also hedging their bets. Joining an existing wave of litigation is cheaper than going alone, and discovery in the New York Times case has already produced internal OpenAI documents that smaller publishers can cite. In legal circles, the strategy is often called “piggyback discovery,” and it is becoming the playbook of choice for regional dailies. For readers who follow how media economics intersect with gaming and streaming platforms, the ripple effects are similar to those discussed in pieces on BGMI Redeem Codes September dynamics and platform monetization.

What the Suit Could Cost

The damages ask is not specified in dollar terms, but the structure mirrors prior media suits: statutory damages per infringed article, plus disgorgement of any revenue Microsoft or OpenAI earned using the plaintiffs’ content.

If courts award even the lower bound of statutory damages, the tab could run into nine figures per plaintiff. A potential injunction is the bigger threat. An order forcing OpenAI to retrain or filter its models would set a precedent that ripples across every AI lab, including those building tools used by gamers, creators, and even Ultimate Guide: How to platforms that rely on licensed media.

What’s Next for the Times Newsday Case

The defendants have 21 days from service to respond. OpenAI is expected to lean on the fair-use doctrine, arguing that training is transformative and that any reproduction is incidental. Microsoft will likely argue it is a downstream user, not a trainer. Both defenses have failed in earlier rulings, though none have been tested at this scale.

Discovery will be the next battlefield, and it will be brutal. Expect internal Slack messages, dataset logs, and licensing memos to surface publicly by mid-2027. For an industry watching its content fuel systems that may eventually replace it, that transparency cannot come soon enough. The outcome of this Times Newsday case will shape whether journalism remains a feedstock or becomes a fee. Quick takeaway: Two regional dailies just forced the AI industry’s biggest partnership into a courtroom, and the verdict will decide whether training on news is fair use or copyright infringement.

What are the Seattle Times and Newsday alleging?

They claim OpenAI and Microsoft used millions of their copyrighted articles to train ChatGPT and Copilot without permission or payment.

Which court is hearing the case?

The lawsuit was reportedly filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

How does this connect to the New York Times lawsuit?

The Times Newsday complaint borrows legal theories from the December 2023 NYT suit and may benefit from discovery already produced in that case.

What could an injunction force OpenAI to do?

A court could order OpenAI to retrain or filter its models to exclude the plaintiffs’ content, a precedent that would reshape every major AI lab.

Why is Microsoft named alongside OpenAI?

Microsoft holds a multibillion-dollar investment partnership with OpenAI, reported at approximately $13 billion total, and the plaintiffs argue that financial partnership makes Microsoft jointly responsible for how the models were built.

Coverage of related platform disputes, including Ultimate Guide: Fortnite Redeem licensing fights, shows how courts are increasingly unwilling to separate parent companies from their AI partners, while entertainment news on HDHub4u Hollywood Hindi Dubbed distribution continues to test similar boundaries.

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