Microsoft and OpenAI Face Lawsuit From 400 Newspaper Owners

Microsoft and OpenAI are facing another major copyright lawsuit after a coalition of publishers that collectively own nearly 400 newspapers accused the companies of using copyrighted news articles without permission to train artificial intelligence models.

According to Bloomberg, the lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by what is described as the largest coalition of local newspaper publishers to bring legal action over AI training. The publishers claim Microsoft and OpenAI copied millions of articles to develop products, including ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, without obtaining licenses or paying compensation.

Publishers claim AI companies profited from their reporting

The complaint alleges that Microsoft and OpenAI “systematically and secretly” crawled publisher websites, copied articles onto their own servers, and used that material to train large language models.

According to the lawsuit, the companies allegedly collected both freely accessible articles and content protected behind paywalls or other access restrictions. The publishers argue they received none of the financial benefits despite AI products generating billions of dollars in market value.

The coalition is seeking statutory damages and a court order preventing further alleged copyright infringement. It also accuses the companies of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), claiming copyright management information such as author credits and copyright notices was removed during the data collection process.

Local journalism at the center of the dispute

The publishers argue that unrestricted scraping of newspaper content threatens the long-term sustainability of local journalism.

According to the complaint, allowing AI companies to build commercial products from publisher content without compensation could become a “death knell for local journalism.” The coalition says local newspapers invest significant resources into original reporting while AI developers benefit from that work without sharing revenue.

The case adds to a growing list of lawsuits against AI companies over the data used to train generative AI models. Previous legal actions have come from authors, artists, major media organizations, and newspaper publishers, with courts expected to play a key role in determining how copyright law applies to AI training.

OpenAI defends its training practices

Responding to Bloomberg, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company’s models are trained on publicly available data and that their development is grounded in fair use principles. Microsoft had not publicly commented on the lawsuit at the time of reporting.

In other AI news, OpenAI recently unveiled its custom AI chip, expanded its Daybreak initiative, and launched the Patch the Planet program aimed at improving open source software security.