OpenAI and Microsoft are facing another legal challenge, this time from two prominent American news organizations that accuse the companies of using their journalism without permission to train artificial intelligence systems.
The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit arguing that generative AI threatens to leave the journalism industry “broken beyond repair.” The complaint characterizes the technology as “a snake eating its own tail,” warning that it could “destroy the very organizations” responsible for producing the content used to train these models.
The Core of the Complaint
According to the lawsuit, AI tools such as ChatGPT and Copilot are marketed as content creators, but function instead as heavy consumers of human work. The filing states that these products are “rapacious consumers, devouring human-authored content and delivering back to the world copies and derivative imitations of that same original content they consumed to achieve their commercial objectives.”
The claims center on copyright infringement, echoing arguments raised in earlier legal battles against the two tech companies. The publishers contend that their journalism was used to build commercial AI products without authorization or compensation.
A Growing Wave of Lawsuits
The action follows a string of similar cases. In 2023, The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner and investor Microsoft over alleged copyright violations. Additional publications have since joined the legal push as that case has progressed through the courts.
The Seattle Times complaint stands out for a specific reason: Microsoft and OpenAI have previously funded some of the newspaper’s journalism projects and fellowships. That prior relationship adds an unusual dimension to the dispute between the parties.
Microsoft Responds
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was “surprised by the lawsuit,” while adding that it is “always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute.” OpenAI has not issued a public statement addressing the specific claims raised by the two publishers.
The lawsuit reflects mounting tension between the media industry and the developers of large language models, as questions over how AI systems are trained continue to move into the courtroom. For US publishers, the outcome of these cases could shape whether news organizations receive compensation when their reporting is used to power commercial AI tools.
The Seattle Times and Newsday now join a list of media companies pursuing legal remedies against the two firms, with each new filing widening the scope of the ongoing fight over AI training data and copyright protections in the United States.
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Image: techcrunch.com
