The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a new lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging copyright infringement for using their journalism without permission to train AI systems. According to Reuters, the lawsuit was filed on Friday, adding to the growing legal challenges facing AI companies over copyrighted material usage. The newspapers allege that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped their websites, including content behind paywalls, and incorporated their articles into datasets used to train and operate products such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI features. Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote to employees that the company feels strongly about defending content they spend millions of dollars a year to produce from being used without consent or compensation. The lawsuit seeks an order requiring OpenAI and Microsoft to destroy copies of their works, as well as any training datasets or AI models that incorporate the newspapers' content.
The Trump administration has filed a statement of interest supporting OpenAI in its copyright dispute with the New York Times and other newspapers over the company's use of their work to train large language models. According to reports from Reuters and TheWrap, the filing was made in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, marking what appears to be the first known intervention by the US government in the growing number of copyright cases surrounding AI training. While statements of interest don't carry binding legal weight, they do carry significant weight with judges, especially when they come from the federal government itself. US Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward stated that "AI dominance is critical to promote national security, prosperity, and economic mobility for all Americans." The government emphasized that "The United States has a strong interest in this court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law" based on concerns including scientific advancement and national security. Woodward added that "This Administration will never let our nation beat a disadvantage relative to our foreign adversaries based on a plainly incorrect understanding of copyright law."
The Times' lawsuit, first filed in December 2023, accuses OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train OpenAI's popular chatbot. According to Reuters, the case is part of a much wider legal fight where authors, publishers, music companies and news organisations have filed similar claims against AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms. The Times is seeking what it calls "billions of dollars" in damages from both OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing the companies built commercial products on the back of journalism they never licensed. The Times and more than a dozen other media organizations sought sanctions against OpenAI in July, accusing the company of withholding evidence during discovery in their copyright litigation. In June, a coalition of nearly 400 news publishers sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that their content was scraped without permission or compensation to train AI products. The newspaper has argued that products like ChatGPT can compete with its journalism and deprive it of subscription, licensing and ad revenue. The latest lawsuit from Seattle Times and Newsday further demonstrates the widespread nature of these copyright disputes across multiple news organizations.
An OpenAI spokesperson told Reuters that its models are trained on publicly available data and that the company believes its practices are protected by fair use. The spokesperson did not comment specifically on the latest lawsuit. Meanwhile, a Microsoft spokesperson, based near Seattle in Washington state, told Reuters in an email that "they are surprised by the lawsuit but recognised the importance of local journalism and they're always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute." A New York Times spokesperson responded to the government's filing, stating that the administration was "siding with a handful of trillion-dollar AI companies at the expense of the countless American creators whose work they stole." The Times has consistently argued that AI companies are essentially laundering its reporting, using it to build products that then compete with the very journalism it was trained on, without ever paying a licensing fee. The latest legal challenges reflect the ongoing tension between AI companies' need for data to train their systems and publishers' rights to control their content and monetization.
In India, the Copyright Act 1957 contains a fair-dealing framework but does not expressly create a comprehensive text-and-data-mining exception. The Delhi High Court's interim ruling in ANI Media Pvt Ltd v OpenAI Opco LLC on 24 July 2026 declined to grant ANI an injunction and held that OpenAI's storage and use of ANI's literary works to train ChatGPT models could fall within the fair-dealing exception for private or personal use, including research. The decision does not finally settle Indian copyright law but provides the most important judicial indication yet of how courts may analyse AI training. Section 52 provides that fair dealing with a work for private or personal use, including research, criticism or review, or reporting current events and current affairs, does not constitute infringement. The ruling indicates that commercial operation does not necessarily prevent an AI developer from relying on Section 52, as the Court treated the training process as potentially falling within private or personal use, including research, without considering OpenAI's commercial status as sufficient to exclude the defence.
