Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over AI Training

Most publisher lawsuits against AI companies stick to a single legal theory: copyright infringement from unauthorized training. Seattle Times and Newsday's complaint stacks a second, less common claim on top of it. Alongside copyright counts, the 38-page filing alleges trademark dilution - arguing that when OpenAI's models generate fabricated content and falsely attribute it to The Seattle Times or Newsday, that hallucinated misattribution damages the outlets' brand independent of whatever happened during training ^[1]. It's a theory aimed less at what went into the model and more at what comes out of it: invented quotes, invented stories, dressed up with a real masthead. The complaint also leans on a memorable framing borrowed from industry commentary, describing generative AI's relationship to the news business as 'a snake eating its own tail' ^[3]- AI answer engines trained on journalism now substituting for the journalism itself. Combined with a request for outright destruction of the offending models and datasets ^[2], the filing reads as an attempt to raise the cost of getting this wrong well past a licensing fee.

The clearest fight in this case may not be about law at all - it's about measurement. Microsoft says it ran its own internal analysis of 8.2 million Copilot conversations and found only 24 responses containing matching passages from copyrighted news content. The plaintiffs' investigators, using the Center for Investigative Reporting's tooling, scanned a different set and found 59,545 conversations with 16-or-more-word overlaps with published journalism, including 51 instances of substantial overlap ^[4]. Those numbers aren't just far apart, they're built on different samples and different definitions of 'overlap' - which means before a judge even reaches fair use, the parties will likely fight about whose yardstick counts. The plaintiffs' attorneys have also cited a 47% year-over-year drop in search referral traffic to midsize publishers as of December 2025 to argue AI answer engines are substituting for site visits ^[1]- though that stat describes an industry-wide trend, not a decline specifically traced to OpenAI or Microsoft's products.

There's an awkward history buried in this filing. Microsoft has previously funded Seattle Times journalism fellowships, including support tied to the Lenfest Institute - meaning one of the two companies now named as a defendant has also been a benefactor of the newsroom it's accused of scraping ^[5]. Seattle Times CEO Alan Fisco frames the suit as reluctant rather than adversarial, insisting: 'We feel strongly that we must defend our content - which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce - from being used without our consent or compensation' ^[6]. Plaintiffs' attorney Steven Lieberman put the economic argument more bluntly: AI companies pay for the chips that run their models but balk at paying the people whose work trains them - 'Defendants pay for the chips... But they seem to think that it is somehow OK for them to take the content produced by hard-working journalists without consent or compensation' ^[4].

This isn't the first publisher to make this argument, and the timing is not a coincidence. The New York Times opened this legal front in December 2023 ^[8], and that case has since absorbed related claims from other publishers into a consolidated multidistrict litigation in front of Judge Sidney Stein ^[3]. On September 4, 2026 - the same day Seattle Times and Newsday filed - OpenAI, Microsoft, and five news organizations in that consolidated case filed competing summary judgment motions covering roughly 10.8 million articles, asking the court to resolve the core fair-use question before trial ^[7]. Whatever Judge Stein decides there will shape every satellite suit still working through the courts, including this one. Complicating the picture further, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a statement on September 1, 2026 siding with OpenAI and Microsoft in the Times case, arguing that restricting AI training would stifle 'scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility' ^[1]- a sign federal policy currently leans toward the AI companies' side, even as more publishers line up against them. Not every publisher has chosen litigation: AP and Vox Media instead struck licensing deals with OpenAI, betting that getting paid beats getting a court ruling ^[3]. Anthropic's decision to settle comparable claims for $1.5 billion in 2025 ^[1]shows the range of outcomes still on the table.