The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Sept. 5, alleging the companies scraped paywalled journalism without permission to train AI products, according to TechCrunch and The Verge. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, names ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI features as products built on the scraped material, TechCrunch reported.
The complaint says OpenAI and Microsoft "methodically" scraped the newspapers' websites, bypassing paywalls, and describes generative AI as consuming "human-authored content and delivering back to the world copies and derivative imitations," according to TechCrunch's account of the filing.
The publishers say the practice gave readers an AI-generated substitute for their journalism, cutting the traffic and advertising revenue that funds it, and are asking the court to order the destruction of the training datasets and any AI models built from them, TechCrunch reported.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was "surprised by the lawsuit" but willing to "sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute," according to TechCrunch.
It's the same claim The New York Times brought against the same two companies in December 2023, and dozens of publishers have filed versions of it since. None has forced a change in how the labs source training data, so this suit joins a queue rather than forcing a resolution.