Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft over news scraping for AI training

What happened

On 4 September 2026, The Seattle Times Company and Newsday LLC filed a copyright complaint against OpenAI entities and Microsoft Corporation in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (Case No. 1:26-cv-07644, 38 pages). The publishers allege that OpenAI and Microsoft copied "vast quantities" of their paywalled journalism — by scraping their websites with automated bots, bypassing paywalls, and ignoring access norms — and used the copies to train, fine-tune, and ground the large language models behind ChatGPT, Copilot, and Bing Chat.

The complaint further alleges the defendants compiled the material into large-scale datasets derived from WebText, WebText2, Common Crawl, and Microsoft's Bing search index; deliberately removed or altered copyright management information (article titles, author names, copyright notices); and that the models store copies of the content and regurgitate it verbatim when prompted. The publishers also plead Lanham Act trademark-dilution and state-law claims. These are allegations; no ruling has issued.

Why it may matter to you

If you write for or publish news, this complaint is the latest in the consolidated publisher litigation against OpenAI/Microsoft and the first to detail a paywall-bypass scraping theory alongside CMI-removal and verbatim-regurgitation allegations. Its fate will shape how the other pending publisher cases (NYT, Daily News, Intercept, Raw Story) are litigated.

What is not yet known

Whether the case will be consolidated with the existing multi-district publisher litigation (No. 25-md-03143, S.D.N.Y.); whether the paywall-circumvention allegations support a DMCA § 1201 claim in addition to the § 1202 CMI claims; and how the court treats the fair-use defense the defendants have asserted publicly.