Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft

The Seattle Times Company and Newsday LLC sued OpenAI entities and Microsoft Corporation on 4 September 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The filing is a 38-page federal copyright complaint, case 1:26-cv-07644, Document 1, with a jury trial demanded and Klaris Law PLLC as counsel. It is a set of allegations, not a ruling and not a settlement.

The papers say the companies copied the newspapers' journalism without permission to train and operate ChatGPT, Copilot, and Bing Chat. They allege scraping bots bypassed paywalls and ignored robots.txt. Newsday has run a hard paywall since August 2022, and the complaint says its robots.txt disallows OpenAI and Common Crawl.

The datasets named include WebText, WebText2, Common Crawl WARC files, and Microsoft's Bing index. The Seattle Times has about 108,000 digital-only subscribers. The two papers claim a combined 30 Pulitzer Prizes (11 for the Times, 19 for Newsday).

The complaint's concrete output example is the regurgitation test. It says ChatGPT produced 88 consecutive words verbatim from The Seattle Times Pulitzer-winning Boeing 737 MAX coverage when prompted with only the headline and URL.

The prayer for relief includes impoundment or destruction under 17 U.S.C. Section 503 of copies of the works and of any LLMs and training datasets that incorporate them. The complaint also says three disclosed OpenAI news licensing deals exceed $300 million, naming the Associated Press, News Corp, Axios, Axel Springer, The Atlantic, the Financial Times, Dotdash Meredith, and Vox among licensees.

Microsoft told GeekWire it was surprised and is open to sit down. Channel NewsAsia, citing Reuters, quoted a Microsoft spokesperson saying the company appreciates local journalism and is "always happy to sit down and explore solutions." OpenAI said its models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use.

GeekWire notes Microsoft Philanthropies underwrites some Seattle Times projects, and that a 2024 Microsoft and OpenAI $10 million Lenfest AI fellowship included both papers. Seattle Times CEO Alan Fisco told staff the paper must defend content it spends millions a year to produce.

The suit sits next to The New York Times' 2023 case against the same defendants. Reuters reported that a Justice Department brief this week sided with Microsoft and OpenAI there, arguing training is generally fair use. GeekWire says publishers in that matter moved for summary judgment on Friday. None of that is a finding that these two papers were infringed.

The filing is the same class of action as the Sony and Warner Chappell complaint against Anthropic: a copyright complaint, not a verdict. OpenAI is also in the news for agents writing to a German wiki. Separate from training suits, Meta just posted a proposed youth-safety settlement that is likewise not a liability finding.

If you are GC, newsroom counsel, or AI product counsel this week, inventory training and RAG against robots.txt and paywall terms, treat a Section 503 destruction ask as a diligence risk, and decide whether to negotiate a license before a complaint lands.