Seattle Times and Newsday Join the Legal Assault on OpenAI and Microsoft

The Seattle Times and Newsday have become the latest publications to sue OpenAI and Microsoft, filing copyright suits that accuse the companies of building their AI products on unlicensed journalism, TechCrunch reported Friday.

The complaints

The two papers join a growing roster of publishers — led by the New York Times, whose landmark case continues to grind through discovery — alleging that OpenAI trained its models on their archives without permission and that ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot reproduce or closely paraphrase their reporting, siphoning traffic and subscription revenue.

Regional and metro papers have increasingly concluded that litigation, not licensing, is their only leverage. Unlike national outlets that have signed content deals with OpenAI — including News Corp, Axel Springer and the Financial Times — most regional publishers were never offered comparable terms.

A widening legal front

The suits land in the middle of the most active season of AI copyright litigation yet:

• Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell sued Anthropic in late August, calling its lyric scraping "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history" and seeking up to $150,000 per song.
• Authors are publicly fighting publishers and agents over shares of Anthropic's $1.5 billion book settlement, which began paying out this summer.
• Universal Music Publishing's second suit against Anthropic, covering more than 20,000 works, seeks over $3 billion.

The stakes

Courts have so far split the baby: training on copyrighted material has been ruled fair use in key decisions, but acquiring that material through piracy has not — the distinction that produced Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement. For OpenAI and Microsoft, the accumulating suits are less an existential threat than a rising tax, but each new plaintiff strengthens the argument that the industry's data practices require a licensing regime. With newspapers, music publishers and authors all converging on the same theory, the question is no longer whether AI companies will pay for content — it is how much, and to whom.