U.S. Two Newspapers Sue OpenAI and Microsoft

Seattle Times and Newsday, major U.S. regional newspapers, have filed lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft. Both companies claim that their news content was used without authorization in AI training, and legal pushback from the media industry continues to grow.

This is not the first lawsuit concerning the use of news content by AI companies for training. Since The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in late 2023, multiple media companies have pursued similar legal action. Large Language Models (LLMs) require vast amounts of text data for training, much of which is reportedly collected from news articles online, making copyright infringement a central issue.

In this lawsuit, both Seattle Times and Newsday argue that their journalism content created through their own reporting and editorial work has been used for AI training without permission. At this time, the specific claims and compensation amounts sought in the litigation have not been confirmed, but the structure of the dispute is consistent with previous lawsuits filed by news organizations.

The significance of this development lies beyond the individual outcomes of lawsuits. News organizations have long been forced to transform their revenue models amid the wave of digitalization. Compounded by this new issue of content utilization by AI, the fundamental question of "who is deriving value from whose content" is once again being raised across the industry.

How legal decisions ultimately settle will significantly affect how AI companies acquire training data in the future and what contractual relationships they establish with media companies. Some AI companies are already moving toward licensing agreements with media organizations, and the outcome of lawsuits could influence the foundation of those negotiations.

Going forward, how courts interpret copyright treatment in AI training will be a critical focal point determining the direction of the entire industry. As individual lawsuits accumulate, judicial precedent gradually takes shape, and this issue—at the intersection of media, AI, and law—remains a matter requiring continued attention.