The Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI entities and Microsoft over use of their journalism in AI products

The complaint

The Seattle Times Company and Newsday LLC v. OpenAI, Inc., OpenAI GP, LLC, OpenAI, LLC, OpenAI OpCo, LLC, OpenAI Global LLC, OAI Corporation, OpenAI Holdings, LLC, OpenAI Foundation, OpenAI Group PBC, and Microsoft Corporation, No. 1:26-cv-07644 (S.D.N.Y.), is a 38-page complaint filed September 4, 2026, ECF No. 1, with a jury demand. After a clerk's notice that the first filing was not signed by the filing attorney, the plaintiffs refiled the complaint on September 8, 2026 as ECF No. 11. The complaint describes The Seattle Times Company as a Delaware corporation based in Seattle, Washington, founded in 1886, and Newsday LLC as a Delaware limited liability company based in Melville, New York, founded in 1940. The registered works are listed in Exhibits 1 and 2.

What it alleges

The complaint alleges, on information and belief, that the defendants obtained copies of the plaintiffs' articles by scraping their websites with automated bots and bypassing their paywalls, incorporated them into training datasets including ones derived from WebText, WebText2, Common Crawl, and Microsoft's Bing search index, and used them to train, fine-tune, and ground the models behind ChatGPT, Copilot, and Bing Chat. It alleges, on information and belief, that the defendants removed copyright management information such as article titles, author names, and copyright notices, that their products reproduce the articles verbatim or in close paraphrase, and that they copy current articles for retrieval-augmented generation. As one example, it alleges a model reproduced 88 consecutive words of an article from The Seattle Times' Pulitzer-winning series on a 2019 airliner crash and the federal investigation that followed when prompted with the headline and URL.

The complaint also alleges that the defendants' products hallucinate content they attribute to the plaintiffs, or attribute the plaintiffs' content to other sources, and that this associates THE SEATTLE TIMES and NEWSDAY marks, which it says are federally registered, with content the plaintiffs did not create.

Counts and relief

Count I pleads copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501, and Count II pleads vicarious copyright infringement against Microsoft and several of the OpenAI entities. Count III pleads removal of copyright management information under 17 U.S.C. § 1202(b)(1), and Count IV distribution of works with that information removed under § 1202(b)(3). Count V pleads federal trademark dilution under 15 U.S.C. § 1125(c), Count VI dilution under Washington law, RCW 19.77.160, on behalf of The Seattle Times, and Count VII dilution under New York General Business Law § 360-L on behalf of Newsday. The prayer seeks statutory damages, or actual damages and profits, under 17 U.S.C. § 504 and for each § 1202 violation; a permanent injunction; impoundment or destruction under 17 U.S.C. § 503 of copies of the works and of all LLMs and training datasets incorporating them; an injunction against dilutive uses with an accounting of profits, damages, and treble damages; and costs, expenses, and attorneys' fees.

On the docket

On September 9, 2026 the clerk accepted the case as related to In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, No. 1:25-md-03143, and reassigned it from Judge Jed S. Rakoff to Judge Sidney H. Stein, with Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang. On September 15, Judge Stein ordered the plaintiffs to show cause why the case should not be stayed pending resolution of summary judgment motions in the other active MDL cases. The parties then stipulated to that stay, and Judge Stein so-ordered it on September 28, 2026. The stipulation calls for a joint status report within 30 days of rulings on those motions and lets any party move to lift the stay for good cause. Executed waivers of service were filed on September 29.