Seattle Times Sues Microsoft and OpenAI Over AI Training

Seattle's Hometown Paper Takes Legal Action

The Seattle Times Co. filed a lawsuit Friday against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging the companies illegally scraped hundreds of thousands of articles from The Seattle Times and Newsday to train their artificial intelligence models. The complaint, which seeks financial damages and destruction of training datasets containing their content, accuses the tech companies of bypassing paywalls and violating terms of service.

The case adds a complicated dimension to the ongoing legal battles over AI training data: Microsoft Philanthropies funds some Seattle Times journalism projects, and both Microsoft and OpenAI jointly provided $10 million in 2024 for a Lenfest Institute AI fellowship that included both newspapers as participants. The Seattle Times maintains it preserves editorial independence despite these financial relationships.

Evidence of Verbatim Reproduction

The complaint includes specific examples of ChatGPT reproducing Seattle Times and Newsday articles nearly word-for-word. In one instance, the chatbot generated an 88-word verbatim passage from the newspaper's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Boeing 737 MAX crashes when prompted with only the article's headline and web address.

According to the lawsuit, the threat extends beyond copyright infringement. "Like a snake eating its own tail, GenAI that is trained on painstakingly researched, expensive-to-produce content threatens to destroy the very news organizations by competing directly with them through AI-generated substitutive content," the complaint states.

Why it matters

This lawsuit highlights the tension between AI companies' need for training data and publishers' economic survival. When AI models can reproduce journalism on demand, they potentially eliminate the traffic and revenue that fund original reporting. The case becomes particularly significant given the existing financial ties between the parties, suggesting that even funding partnerships haven't resolved fundamental disputes over content use and compensation.

Growing Legal Pressure

The Seattle Times and Newsday join an expanding roster of publishers pursuing legal action against OpenAI and Microsoft. The New York Times filed a similar copyright lawsuit in 2023, and cases from the New York Daily News, Ziff Davis, and the Center for Investigative Reporting have been consolidated before U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein in Manhattan. On Friday, both publishers and the tech companies filed motions for summary judgment in those consolidated cases.

This week, the U.S. Justice Department filed a brief supporting Microsoft and OpenAI in the New York Times case, arguing that a ruling favoring publishers would harm American AI development.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has negotiated licensing agreements with more than a dozen outlets, including The Associated Press, News Corp, and Axel Springer. According to the Seattle Times complaint, publicly disclosed terms for three of those deals exceed $300 million combined.

Microsoft responded to the lawsuit Friday evening, stating: "While we're surprised by the lawsuit, we appreciate the importance of the Seattle Times to our region and we're always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute." Whether licensing negotiations occurred before the lawsuit remains unclear.

Seattle Times Co. President and CEO Alan Fisco, who assumed the role January 1, acknowledged the difficulty of the decision in an internal memo, emphasizing the need to defend content that costs millions of dollars annually to produce.

These details were first reported by GeekWire.