OpenAI and Microsoft face another lawsuit from news organizations the Seattle Times and Newsday, which accuse the tech giants of using their sites to train AI without permission. The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that the companies scraped paywalled content and added it to training datasets used for ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and the new AI-powered Bing.
Lawsuit Details and Allegations
The lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York alleges that these companies have been found complicit in scraping the newspapers’ websites, including content behind paywall and incorporated articles into dataset used to train and operate products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI features.
The chatbots were able to reproduce entire passages and closely paraphrase reporters’ work, the publishers claim. The newspaper further alleged that using the AI models, these tech giants extract, reproduce and paraphrase passages from their originally published articles and answer the users’ queries. These blatant infringements not only harm web traffic but also reduce the need to buy subscriptions for news journalism.
The lawsuit demands that the tech companies destroy any existing copies of the published material, as well as training datasets or AI models that incorporate it, Reuters reported. As per the suit, Newsday and The Seattle Times are seeking an order that could order destruction of copies of their works as well as training datasets or AI models incorporating them.
“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, Seattle Times president and CEO in a message to employees
Tech Companies’ Responses
OpenAI said in a response to the press that the company only uses publicly available materials grounded in fair use for model training. Against the backdrop of this lawsuit, OpenAI responded while clarifying that all of its AI models are being trained on publicly available data and based on fair use. However, a spokesperson did not specifically comment on the lawsuit.
Microsoft said it was surprised by the lawsuit, but was willing to sit down and explore solutions
with the publishers. A spokesperson for Microsoft, based near Seattle in Washington state, said in an email, While we’re surprised by the lawsuit, we appreciate the importance of local journalism and we’re always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute.
Prior Litigation and Government Involvement
The AI developer and its collaborator, Microsoft, have faced several court battles over its training data and alleged copyright infringement, including an ongoing lawsuit with the New York Times and a cohort of other publishers. This is not the first time. Even in 2023 The New York Times also sued OpenAI and Microsoft for using millions of article copies to train AI models without their consent.
The Times has argued that the company’s products compete with the news outlet by reproducing its work without appropriately transforming it under existing fair use protections.
Last week, the Trump administration filed a Statement of Interest (SOI) in the case, with the Department of Justice (DOJ) writing that a decision siding with the New York Times would be a hit to local newsrooms and independent journalism. The DOJ argued that AI can be harnessed by small publishers to stay competitive with mainstream news outlets. The brief also claims a Times win would threaten national security
by stalling AI advancement and giving foreign competitors an edge. The administration has used this argument to attempt to thwart litigation against AI data centers, as well.
