Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft, Warning AI Could Break Journalism 'Beyond Repair'

Key points

• The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in 2025, alleging their journalism was used without permission to train AI systems.
• The suit warns the journalism industry could become "broken beyond repair" as AI tools replace the very outlets whose work they were trained on.
• The New York Times first sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, opening a wave of similar copyright cases from news publishers.
• Microsoft had previously funded journalism projects and fellowships at The Seattle Times, making that paper's legal action particularly striking.
• A Microsoft spokesperson said the company is "surprised by the lawsuit" but willing to explore a resolution.

Two more American newspapers have taken OpenAI and Microsoft to court, claiming the companies hoovered up years of professional journalism to train their AI products without asking, paying, or crediting anyone.

The Seattle Times and Newsday filed the lawsuit together. Their legal complaint paints a grim picture: generative AI, software that produces text, images or audio on demand, is described as "a snake eating its own tail." Train an AI on journalism, the argument goes, and the AI replaces the need to read journalism, which kills the revenue that pays journalists, which dries up the content future AI systems need. A slow death spiral.

Why does it matter that Microsoft funded The Seattle Times?

This detail cuts deep. Microsoft had previously given money to support journalism projects and fellowships at The Seattle Times, the very paper now suing it. Biting the hand that feeds you is one thing; this is more like suing it.

A Microsoft spokesperson told GeekWire, which first reported the local angle, that the company is "surprised by the lawsuit" but "always happy to sit down and explore solutions."

What do the newspapers actually claim?

The core allegation is copyright infringement: the publishers say OpenAI and Microsoft took their articles, fed them into AI training, and their products now reproduce or closely imitate that original work.

The lawsuit's language is unusually sharp. It calls ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot, an AI writing assistant built into Microsoft's software, "rapacious consumers" that devour human-written content and deliver back "copies and derivative imitations" for commercial gain.

Neither OpenAI nor Microsoft has publicly argued that training AI on news articles is illegal. Their general position has been that such use falls under fair use, a legal principle allowing limited use of copyrighted material without payment, though courts have not yet settled the question.

What happens next?

This case joins a queue. The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, and several other publishers have filed their own actions since. No major verdict has landed yet.

For ordinary readers, the practical question is simpler than the legal one. If AI assistants can summarise the news without you visiting a news site, and news sites lose the advertising money that visit would have brought, who pays the reporters? The Seattle Times and Newsday are arguing the answer matters, and that someone in a courtroom should work it out before it is too late.