The Seattle Times Co. and Newsday sued Microsoft and OpenAI on September 4, 2026, accusing the companies of using their journalism to train AI products without permission. ^[1] The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on September 4, alleging copyright infringement. ^[2] The complaint includes examples of ChatGPT reproducing Seattle Times journalism nearly word for word, including an 88-word verbatim stretch from Pulitzer-winning coverage of the Boeing 737 MAX crashes. ^[3] The lawsuit alleges that Microsoft and OpenAI scraped hundreds of thousands of articles from The Seattle Times and Newsday, bypassing paywalls and ignoring terms of service. ^[4] The plaintiffs seek financial damages and the destruction of any training datasets and models built with their content. ^[5] The newspapers claim that the companies' AI products can reproduce passages from their reporting, closely paraphrase articles, and provide users with answers that reduce the need to visit their websites or buy subscriptions. ^[6] The plaintiffs allege that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped their websites, including content behind paywalls, to incorporate articles into datasets used to train and operate AI products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing's AI features. ^[7] The Seattle Times and Newsday are seeking a court order requiring the destruction of copies of their works as well as training datasets or AI models incorporating them. ^[8]