Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI, Microsoft

The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on September 4, alleging the companies scraped paywalled articles to train ChatGPT, Copilot and Bing AI, TechCrunch reports. The complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, asks for something heavier than damages. It wants every AI training set built on the two papers' work destroyed.

That remedy is what separates this suit from a licensing dispute. A settlement check doesn't require touching a trained model. A court order to destroy training data does.

Microsoft said it was surprised by the filing and open to talks. OpenAI restated its fair-use position.

Two regional dailies joining a docket built mostly of national outlets doesn't change the legal argument. It changes the plaintiff class, and a wider, more scattered class makes one settlement price harder to reach.

For OpenAI and Microsoft, the case adds two more mastheads to a fight already crowded with national outlets. For The Seattle Times and Newsday, it's a bet that a federal court will treat their archives as property that outlasts a one-time licensing check.