US newspapers sue OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright

North American newspapers Seattle Times e Newsday filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The allegation is that the companies used vehicle reports, without authorization or payment, to train and operate artificial intelligence systems.

The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York on Friday (September 4, 2026). According to the newspapers, they had content extracted from their websites through scraping (scraping)including material protected by paywalland incorporated into databases used in the development of products such as ChatGPT, from OpenAI, and Copilot and the AI ​​resources of Bing, from Microsoft.

The vehicles claim that the systems can reproduce or paraphrase reports written by them. This may reduce the number of readers directly accessing the site and affect advertising and subscription revenue. Newspapers call for the destruction of unauthorized copies of their content and the datasets and artificial intelligence models that have incorporated this material.

NOW IT HAS SIMILAR ACTION

OpenAI stated that it received the news of the process with surprise and that it is open to dialogue with the media. The company said that its models are trained with publicly available data and that the use of this material may be protected by the principle of fair use (fair use), provided for in North American law. Microsoft also declared itself willing to seek a solution.

On Thursday (September 3, 2026), the United States government presented a statement in favor of OpenAI’s position in a similar dispute involving the newspaper The New York Times. The Justice Department argued that the use of protected content to train AI models may be supported by the fair use and that a more restrictive interpretation could harm the country’s innovation and competitiveness in the sector.

The case adds to a series of disputes between technology companies and content producers. In 2023, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on similar charges.

The dispute expands the debate about the limits for the use of journalistic content by artificial intelligence companies and could influence the next legal disputes over copyright in the United States.