Seattle Times and Newsday are the latest publications to sue OpenAI and Microsoft
- ID
- 21895
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 06 Sep 2026, 6:49 AM
- Fetched
- 06 Sep 2026, 7:20 AM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/05/seattle-times-and-newsday-are-the-latest-publications-to-sue-openai-and-microsoft/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 4.5
- Created
- 06 Sep 2026, 7:20 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- ai_ml_learnerssaas_foundersdevelopers
What happened
The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging unauthorized use of their journalism to train AI models, calling generative AI 'a snake eating its own tail' that could destroy the content producers it depends on. Notably, Microsoft and OpenAI had previously funded some Seattle Times journalism projects and fellowships, making the lawsuit an unusual escalation against a funder.
Why it matters
For builders shipping AI products that ingest or summarize third-party content, this adds to a growing pattern of litigation (following NYT's 2023 suit) that signals real legal exposure around training data provenance. If you are scraping or licensing content for RAG pipelines or model training, treat unlicensed news content as a litigation risk, not just a Terms-of-Service issue.
Discussion angle
The irony that Microsoft/OpenAI funded Seattle Times projects yet still got sued — does partnership or funding with a content owner actually reduce legal risk, or is it irrelevant once the core training-data dispute is on the table?