September 5, 2026 · Legal · Copyright
The Seattle Times Company and Newsday filed suit Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of scraping their sites—including paywalled stories—and using the material to train and operate ChatGPT, Copilot, and Bing AI features.
The filing is politically pointed. Microsoft’s hometown paper is now a plaintiff against Microsoft. That sits beside the New York Times’s long-running case, where new Friday filings leaned on copyright law, culture, and sports, and where the Justice Department has argued that OpenAI’s use of Times articles was lawful and tied to national-security competitiveness.
Publishers say the pattern is settled: models ingest journalism at scale, then compete with the same newsrooms for reader attention. Labs say training on publicly available text is fair use and that licensed deals already exist with some outlets. Courts have not produced a clean national rule.
More local and regional papers joining SDNY actions increases settlement pressure and the odds that Congress or a circuit split, not a single trial, will set the market terms for training data.
Key takeaway. Copyright fights are no longer just flagship titles versus labs. Hometown papers suing hometown tech giants make training-data risk a board-level item for both Microsoft and OpenAI.
Photo: Unsplash / AbsolutVision (newspapers).
Sources: Economic Times (Sept. 5, 2026); GeekWire (Sept. 4); New York Times AI docket coverage.
