The Aporia · Seattle Times, Newsday sue OpenAI, Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement

Seattle Times, Newsday sue OpenAI, Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement

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The Straits Times. (2026, September 6). Seattle Times, Newsday sue OpenAI, Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement. The Straits Times. https://www.straitstimes.com/world/united-states/seattle-times-newsday-sue-openai-microsoft-alleging-copyright-infringement

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Quick Summary

The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit in federal court against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the two companies copied their journalism without permission to train their AI systems. The suit claims that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped content from the newspapers' websites, including articles behind paywalls, and incorporated it into datasets used for products like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. According to the lawsuit, the companies' AI products can reproduce passages from the newspapers' reporting and provide users with answers that reduce the need to visit their websites or buy subscriptions. The Seattle Times and Newsday are seeking an order requiring OpenAI and Microsoft to destroy copies of their works and retrain their AI models.

Written by AI on 2026-09-06, from this article's own text only (the story summary below draws on all the coverage).

AI analysis

Story summary

Here's a summary of the news story:

President Donald Trump's Justice Department has sided with tech giant OpenAI in a court battle over the company's use of copyrighted material to train its artificial intelligence tools. The department argued that restricting OpenAI's access to intellectual property could harm the country's dominance in the AI industry and hinder scientific progress.

The lawsuit, which includes multiple media companies, including The Intercept, The New York Times, Seattle Times, and Newsday, alleges that OpenAI and its largest investor Microsoft scraped copyrighted content from news websites without permission to train their AI systems. The newspapers claim that this use of their content without compensation or consent reduces the need for users to visit their websites or subscribe to their services.

The Justice Department's filing argues that using copyrighted material for transformative purposes, such as training AI models, should be considered fair use under copyright law. This move has been criticized by litigating attorney Matt Topic, who represents The Intercept in its lawsuit, as being out of touch with the financial realities faced by media outlets.

Written for “OpenAI Copyright Lawsuit” on 2026-10-30, grounded in this article and the 2 other(s) covering the same event.

Compared with similar articles

This article reads unscored and hedges 11% of its claims. Each row says how that neighbour differs.

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Hedges 7 of 30 claims Outlet record 67/100

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“Article B refers to a lawsuit filed on September 4, which is not mentioned in Article A”

How this article was measured signals, leaning charts, publisher record, byline, topics and claims

Signals How these are calculated →

Claims extracted

sentences that state something as happening or true

Uncertain

11%

1 of 9 hedged ("reportedly", "may", "according to")

Leaning

not political

takes no side on a contested political question

Publisher signals

66/100

The Straits Times's corrections and hedging, across everything collected from it. Not a measure of accuracy.

Outlets on this story

Technology

Same framing elsewhere

articles that frame the event the way this one does

Analyzed 2026-09-06 · how these are computed

How this is being covered How these are calculated →

Article leaning vs. publisher reliability

Source leaning vs. consistency

Publisher

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Running correction rate · 5 correction(s)

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Topics

Microsoft NEW YORK Newsday OpenAI Seattle Times

Subjects

OpenAI ORG · 7× Microsoft ORG · 6× Newsday ORG · 3× NEW YORK GPE · 2× Seattle ORG · 2× Seattle Times ORG · 2× The Seattle Times ORG · 2× Bing PERSON · 1× District Court ORG · 1× the Southern District of New York GPE · 1×

Narrative

The suit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the newspapers’ websites, including content behind paywalls, and incorporated articles into datasets used to train and operate products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI features.

framing: assertive · carried by 1 article(s) · first seen 2026-09-06

2026-09-06 · The Straits Times

Seattle Times, Newsday sue OpenAI, Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement · assertive framing

Claims (9 extracted, 1 hedged)

Seattle Times, Newsday sue OpenAI, Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement NEW YORK - asserted

Times → sue → infringement

The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Sept 4, alleging in federal court that the US tech companies copied the US newspapers’ journalism without permission to train their AI systems. asserted

companies → sue → systems

OpenAI → allege → ChatGPT

The newspapers, based in Seattle and Long Island, New York, said the companies’ AI products can reproduce passages from their reporting, closely paraphrase articles and provide users with answers that reduce the need to visit their websites or buy subscriptions. “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,” Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote to employees, according to the newspaper. uncertain

Fisco → base → newspaper

A spokesperson for San Francisco-based OpenAI said its models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use, without commenting specifically on the lawsuit. asserted

models → base → lawsuit

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.” asserted

we → base → dispute

The Seattle Times and Newsday are seeking an order requiring the destruction of copies of their works as well as training datasets or AI models incorporating them. asserted

Times → seek → them

The lawsuit echoes a case filed by the New York Times in 2023, which accused OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train OpenAI’s popular chatbot. asserted

which → echo → chatbot

The case is ongoing, and is one of dozens brought by copyright holders against tech companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta for what they say is misuse of their material to train AI systems. asserted

they → bring → systems