News publishers file summary-judgment brief accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of five-stage infringement

What happened

On 17 September 2026, news-publisher plaintiffs - including The New York Times, the Daily News plaintiffs, Ziff Davis, the Center for Investigative Reporting and The Intercept - filed a combined summary-judgment brief against OpenAI and Microsoft in the consolidated S.D.N.Y. copyright litigation (1:25-md-03143). The 92-page brief asks the court to find infringement at five stages: acquiring copies of articles, training models on them, grounding model outputs on them, reproducing them in outputs, and exchanging them between the two companies. It quotes internal communications obtained in discovery, including a Microsoft applied-science director's memo warning that large-scale collection of work for AI training could be seen as an unprecedented appropriation, and OpenAI's ChatGPT lead describing publishers as facing an existential threat from substitutive products. The brief also cites Microsoft data on click-through declines and seeks partial summary judgment on removal of copyright management information and per-article statutory damages.

Why it may matter to you

The brief puts the publishers' fullest fair-use argument on the record, with internal company documents cited as evidence - the kind of material courts weigh when assessing market harm, the fourth fair-use factor.

What is not yet known

This is one side's motion; OpenAI and Microsoft dispute the claims and have filed their own motions on the same questions. The court has not ruled, and the exhibits quoted in the brief remain sealed.