The Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the companies of using their journalism without permission to train and operate AI systems. The lawsuit adds two more major news organizations to the growing legal fight over whether AI companies can use copyrighted reporting to build products such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the lawsuit alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the newspapers’ websites, including articles protected by paywalls, and incorporated that material into datasets used to train their AI systems. The publishers say those systems can subsequently reproduce portions of their reporting, closely paraphrase articles, or provide answers that could reduce the need for readers to visit their websites or purchase subscriptions.

That last point is central to the publishers’ argument. Newspapers spend substantial resources reporting, editing and publishing original journalism, while AI chatbots can potentially deliver information derived from that work without sending users back to the publication that produced it.

The Seattle Times has framed the dispute as a fight over the future of the news business. The newspaper’s president and CEO, Alan Fisco, told employees that the company believes it must protect journalism that costs millions of dollars a year to produce from being used without consent or compensation.

The complaint also takes a broader view of generative AI’s effect on journalism, arguing that AI products can consume human-created reporting and then return copies or derivative versions of that material to users. The publishers warn that the technology could ultimately undermine the organizations responsible for producing the information that AI systems depend on.

The lawsuit names Microsoft alongside OpenAI because of Microsoft’s deep integration with OpenAI technology across products including Copilot and Bing’s AI features. Reuters reports that the newspapers are seeking an order requiring the destruction of copies of their works, as well as training datasets and AI models that incorporate their copyrighted material.

OpenAI, meanwhile, maintains that its models are trained using publicly available data and that its practices are protected by the principle of fair use. The company did not specifically comment on the new lawsuit in its response to Reuters. Microsoft said it was surprised by the lawsuit but emphasized the importance of local journalism and said it was willing to discuss potential solutions to the dispute.

The case is the latest chapter in a much larger legal battle between publishers and AI companies. The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, alleging that millions of its articles were used without permission to train AI systems. Since then, numerous copyright holders have filed similar cases against OpenAI and other AI companies, turning the question of AI training data into one of the industry’s most consequential legal disputes.

The Seattle Times lawsuit is notable for another reason: OpenAI and Microsoft have previously supported some of the newspaper’s journalism projects and fellowships. That makes the new legal confrontation an especially striking development in the relationship between the technology companies and one of their local news partners.

For publishers, the stakes extend beyond whether copyrighted articles can be included in training datasets. The bigger question is whether AI assistants can become an alternative destination for information that was originally created and monetized by news organizations.

If readers can ask an AI system for the substance of an article and receive an answer without visiting the publisher’s website, publishers could lose advertising impressions, subscription opportunities and direct relationships with their audiences. That creates a potentially difficult economic equation: news organizations bear the cost of producing original reporting, while AI products could capture the value of that reporting in a different interface.

The Seattle Times and Newsday are now asking a federal court to decide where the legal boundaries should be drawn. The outcome could have implications well beyond these two newspapers, particularly as publishers and AI companies continue to negotiate licensing deals while fighting over the legality of using copyrighted material to develop increasingly capable AI systems.