Two more papers sue OpenAI and Microsoft over training data

The Seattle Times and Newsday have joined the growing list of newsrooms suing OpenAI and Microsoft. They say the companies used their journalism to train AI models without permission or pay.

The lawsuit is the latest in a wave of copyright suits from publishers who believe their work — the reporting, the photos, the bylines — is being mined and resold through AI products. OpenAI and Microsoft have faced similar suits from the New York Times, the Associated Press, and others. The core argument is the same across all of them: copying years of journalism to build a product that competes with the original newsrooms is not fair use.

For the working press, this is a fight over revenue and survival. If AI companies can train on newsrooms' output for free, the incentive to pay for reporting weakens. For readers, it's about whether the stories they trust still come from people paid to dig, fact-check, and write — or from models trained on those same people's work and then re-served back to them.

Why this matters for us: every dollar newsrooms lose to free AI scraping is one less dollar going to the journalists — the ones who cover the neighborhood, the city council, the union halls, the schools — and the ones who file the stories that hold power accountable.