The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Sept. 4, 2026, alleging that the companies used their journalism to train and operate generative-AI products without permission or payment. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is docketed as The Seattle Times Company et al. v. OpenAI Inc. et al., 1:26-cv-07644.
The newspapers’ case is about more than the value of individual articles. Their business model depends on readers paying for access, and they allege that AI systems can weaken that subscription bargain by reproducing reporting or delivering answers without sending readers to a paywalled site. The complaint alleges paywall circumvention and contends that the defendants used paywalled journalism to train and run products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing AI. Those are allegations, not findings by the court.
The requested relief is unusually sweeping. Along with damages, the plaintiffs ask for court orders addressing datasets and models that they say include their articles, including impoundment or destruction. No such remedy has been ordered. The filing is a request for relief, and the case remains at its opening stage.
The dispute also reflects a broader fight over how publishers should be paid when their archives become inputs for AI. A licensing arrangement could treat news as a reusable asset; the plaintiffs instead allege that taking protected, paywalled work without authorization harms the revenue stream that supports reporting. OpenAI has said, according to reported accounts, that its training relies on publicly available data and is grounded in fair use. Microsoft said it was surprised by the lawsuit and remains open to discussions.
The funding backdrop adds an awkward irony, though it is reported context rather than a theme of the complaint.
The Seattle Times has disclosed Microsoft philanthropy support for some journalism projects and fellowships. Reported coverage also says Microsoft and OpenAI funded a 2024 Lenfest AI fellowship received by the paper. That support sits alongside the Times’ allegations that Microsoft and OpenAI’s commercial AI systems appropriated or bypassed access controls around journalism.
Newsday and The Seattle Times are not asking the court merely to settle a licensing bill, according to the complaint. They are asking for damages and for remedies aimed at the systems and datasets themselves. Whether those requests are legally available, and whether the plaintiffs can prove infringement and harm, will be decided through the litigation.
For now, the filing puts subscription economics at the center of the publisher-AI conflict: if readers can obtain the substance of paid reporting from a chatbot, publishers argue, the incentive to subscribe may erode. The defendants are expected to contest the allegations and raise defenses including fair use. The lawsuit does not establish that any infringement occurred.