On September 4, 2026, The Seattle Times and Newsday became the latest news organizations to take generative AI to court, filing a federal copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The publishers allege that the companies copied their journalism — without permission, license, or payment — to train the models behind ChatGPT and other AI products now worth billions. The case is The Seattle Times Company v. OpenAI Inc., No. 1:26-cv-07644, filed in the Southern District of New York under the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 101 et seq.). Within days of filing it drew more than 30 press articles across 30-plus outlets, making it one of the fastest-spreading new copyright filings on the IP Feed.
It also lands in the most consequential IP battleground of the moment. The Seattle Times and Newsday are not opening a new front so much as joining an existing one: the Southern District of New York is where the landmark suit brought by The New York Times against the same defendants, and a growing set of related news-publisher cases, are already being coordinated. What a court decides here will help set the rules for whether — and on what terms — AI companies can train on the work of professional newsrooms.
What the lawsuit says
The core allegation is straightforward, and by now familiar. The publishers say OpenAI and Microsoft scraped large volumes of their copyrighted articles from the open web and used them, without authorization, as training data for large language models. Journalism, they argue, is a valuable proprietary asset — the product of paid reporters, editors, and years of institutional investment — and the defendants built commercial products on top of it while paying nothing for the input.
Suits in this wave typically go beyond the raw copying claim. Publishers have argued that AI systems can reproduce their articles verbatim or in close paraphrase, that chatbots summarize their reporting in ways that substitute for a visit to the original site, and that models sometimes attribute fabricated statements to their outlets — a reputational harm layered on top of the economic one. Many complaints also raise claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for the alleged removal of copyright-management information — the bylines, datelines, and terms of service attached to the original work.
The defendants have not yet answered, and as of this writing no judge has been assigned to the docket. Nothing here has been ruled on. What follows is the legal question the filing raises — not a prediction of how it comes out.
The hard part: fair use
Every one of these cases runs into the same doctrine, and it is the one that will decide them: fair use. The defense's central argument is that training a model on copyrighted text is transformative — that the model does not republish the articles but learns statistical patterns from them to produce something new, much as a search engine indexes the web. AI companies point to a line of cases, including the Google Books decision, where large-scale copying was held to be fair use because the output served a fundamentally different purpose from the original.
The publishers attack that framing on the fourth fair-use factor — the effect on the market for the original work. Their argument is that generative AI is not a neutral index but a direct competitor: a system that ingests journalism and then answers the very questions readers used to visit news sites to answer, siphoning the traffic and licensing revenue those articles were meant to generate. If a court accepts that the AI output substitutes for the original in the market, the transformative-use defense weakens considerably.
Courts weigh four factors — the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the work, the amount taken, and the market effect — and no single factor is dispositive. The unsettled question, the one no appellate court has yet resolved cleanly, is how those factors apply when the "amount taken" is effectively everything and the "new" use competes for the same audience. That is the gap the Seattle Times and Newsday are trying to widen, and the one OpenAI and Microsoft will work to close.
Why it matters beyond one lawsuit
For anyone who owns rights in creative or informational work, this litigation is about far more than two newspapers. It is one of the pressure points that will determine whether training on copyrighted material requires a license at all — and, if it does, what a market for those licenses looks like. Some publishers have already signed content-licensing deals with AI companies; others, like these plaintiffs, are litigating instead. The outcomes will shape which path becomes the default.
There is a quieter lesson for rights holders too. Cases like this turn on the ability to prove exactly what was created, by whom, and when — the same provable chain of authorship and ownership that underpins the value of any IP asset. When the dispute is whether your work was taken and whether its market was harmed, a clean record of what you own and how it has been used is not paperwork; it is leverage.
We'll track this docket as it develops. The first real signals will come when a judge is assigned, when the case's relationship to the coordinated New York AI litigation is clarified, and when the defendants file their response and the shape of their fair-use defense comes into view. Follow the filings, counsel, and coverage on the case page.
This post is editorial commentary on public court filings and news coverage, not legal advice. The allegations described are unproven, and the defendants have not yet responded in court.