The Seattle Times Company and Newsday LLC filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that the technology companies harvested millions of copyrighted articles without authorization to train generative artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. According to the 38-filed complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (Case No. 1:26-cv-07644), the publishers claim the tech firms systematically bypassed technical access controls, including standard robots.txt exclusions, to scrape proprietary news content.
Allegations of Bypassing Access Controls and Scraping
According to the court filing, OpenAI and Microsoft deployed automated web crawlers that ignored explicit machine-readable instructions prohibiting data harvesting. The Seattle Times and Newsday state that the scraping operations stripped copyright metadata and author attributions from the copied works. Furthermore, the lawsuit presents specific evidentiary passages demonstrating that the AI models generated outputs containing near-verbatim text or close paraphrases of original published journalism.
The publishers also allege that AI-generated hallucinations produced fabricated information and incorrectly attributed those errors to the Seattle Times and Newsday brand names. According to the complaint, these inaccurate attributions inflict significant reputational damage on the historic publications.
Economic Strains and Demands for AI Model Destruction
The legal action details severe financial pressures facing regional publishers. According to the complaint, search-referral traffic to mid-sized news organizations dropped by 47 percent between December 2024 and December 2025, undercutting core subscription, advertising, and syndication revenues.
The plaintiffs are seeking unquantified financial damages alongside sweeping structural remedies. The lawsuit asks the court to order the seizure and destruction of all unauthorized copies of the publishers’ works, the underlying training datasets, and any artificial intelligence models built upon them. Additionally, the publishers request a permanent injunction against future unauthorized content use, citing violations of the U.S. Copyright Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and the Lanham Act for trademark dilution.
Broader Legal Landscape and Government Intervention
This litigation joins a growing wave of intellectual property challenges against generative AI developers. More than 400 newspapers, alongside entities such as the Encyclopedia Britannica and independent digital creators, have filed similar legal actions concerning unauthorized content ingestion.
The broader legal battle has drawn direct federal involvement. In separate litigation initiated by The New York Times, the U.S. government intervened by filing a statement of interest siding with OpenAI. Federal lawyers argued that training AI models on protected works qualifies as fair use under copyright law, pointing to national security and technological innovation interests.