Two more American news organizations have joined the growing legal battle against AI giants over training data. The Seattle Times and Long Island-based Newsday filed a federal lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday, arguing that the unchecked use of journalism to train generative AI models could render the news industry "broken beyond repair." The complaint, filed in a Washington state court, represents the most direct challenge yet from regional publishers who say their investigative work and local reporting have been ingested without consent or compensation.
The lawsuit paints a vivid picture of AI as "a snake eating its own tail" — systems that consume human-authored reporting and produce derivative copies, ultimately destroying the very organizations whose work they depend on. "AI products like ChatGPT and CoPilot are touted as producers of content, but in fact they are rapacious consumers, devouring human-authored content and delivering back to the world copies and derivative imitations of that same original content they consumed to achieve their commercial objectives," the complaint states. The filing argues that without legal intervention, the economic foundations of professional journalism will collapse under the weight of AI competition.
The Seattle Times case carries particular weight because Microsoft and OpenAI have previously funded journalism projects and fellowships at the publication, creating what critics call a conflict between the defendants' business practices and their philanthropic commitments to the very industry they now face litigation from. A Microsoft spokesperson told GeekWire the company was "surprised by the lawsuit" but remained "always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute." OpenAI has not yet publicly commented on the specific filing.
The filing follows the landmark New York Times lawsuit from 2023, which opened the floodgates for similar claims across the media industry. As courts grapple with whether AI training constitutes fair use under copyright law, the outcome of these cases could reshape the economics of both the news and AI industries for decades to come.
