Two more newspapers say OpenAI and Microsoft owe them for the words they didn't pay for.
The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the companies trained AI models on their journalism without permission. The suit claims ChatGPT and Copilot sometimes reproduce passages from the papers' reporting almost verbatim in response to user queries. Microsoft is named as a defendant because Copilot runs on OpenAI's underlying technology. The two outlets join a growing list of plaintiffs, including The New York Times, Ziff Davis, Merriam-Webster, and Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as a group of nearly 400 local newspapers that filed a similar suit.
This isn't a fringe complaint anymore. It's the median lawsuit facing OpenAI. When outlets ranging from a dictionary publisher to hundreds of local papers make the same allegation, the pattern looks less like isolated grievance and more like a business model built on unlicensed inputs. Every new filing also raises the stakes for a legal question the courts haven't settled: does training a model on copyrighted text, then having it echo that text back, count as fair use or infringement.
The answer will shape not just OpenAI's balance sheet, but whether every AI company scraping the web owes the news industry a check.