Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft — a complaint that calls GenAI 'a snake eating its own tail'

“Seattle Times and Newsday just sued OpenAI and Microsoft — and the complaint calls generative AI 'a snake eating its own tail'”

Usable claims

• The Seattle Times Company and Newsday LLC sued OpenAI and Microsoft Corporation in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The 38-page complaint — Case 1:26-cv-07644, Document 1, filed 09/04/26, jury trial demanded — was brought by attorneys Klaris Law, PLLC, and asserts claims under the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. Section 101 et seq.), including as amended by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Lanham Act (15 U.S.C. Section 1125(c)), and Washington and New York state laws preventing trademark dilution. The caption names nine OpenAI parties — eight OpenAI entities plus the OpenAI Foundation — collectively 'OpenAI', alongside Microsoft.
• The complaint alleges, in its own words: that the defendants 'have for years obtained copies of Plaintiffs' copyrighted content by methodically scraping ... using automated bots, bypassing Plaintiffs' paywalls'; that copies of the content were incorporated into large-scale datasets 'including but not limited to datasets derived from WebText, WebText2, Common Crawl, and Microsoft's own Bing search index' and used 'to train, fine-tune, and ground the large language models'; that the defendants 'deliberately remove or alter copyright management information ("CMI") ... such as article titles, author names, and copyright notices'; and that 'Defendants' LLMs store copies of that content and, upon information and belief, regurgitate it verbatim when prompted.' Several of these allegations are pleaded 'Upon information and belief' — the complaint's own hedge — and none has been tested in court.
• Verified in the complaint's text: 'this economic cycle may become broken beyond repair. AI products like ChatGPT and CoPilot are touted as producers of content, but in fact they are rapacious consumers, devouring human-authored content and delivering back to the world copies and derivative imitations of that same original content they consumed to achieve their commercial objectives'; 'Like a snake eating its own tail, GenAI that is trained on painstakingly researched, expensive-to-produce content threatens to destroy the very news organizations'; the plaintiffs count 30 Pulitzer Prizes between them, with The Seattle Times founded in 1886 and Newsday serving Long Island and New York City since 1940; The Seattle Times has run a metered digital paywall since spring 2013 — today one free pageview before payment — and Newsday has had a complete hard gate since August 2022.
• Context per TechCrunch's September 5 report: The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner/investor Microsoft back in 2023, and other publications followed suit as that case continued. TechCrunch notes the Seattle Times lawsuit is particularly notable because Microsoft and OpenAI have funded some of the organization's journalism projects and fellowships. A Microsoft spokesperson told GeekWire the company is 'surprised by the lawsuit' but is 'always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute.'