The Seattle Times Co. has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, in the latest move by media companies to call out artificial intelligence players’ alleged copyright violations.

In a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court, The Seattle Times, joined by Newsday, accused OpenAI of using the outlets’ published work to train large language models, also known as chatbots.

“This was not an easy decision,” Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote in an email to employees Friday. “However, we feel strongly that we must defend our content — which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce — from being used without our consent or compensation.”

In the lawsuit, attorneys representing The Seattle Times and Newsday, a daily newspaper based in Long Island, New York, said that OpenAI’s models were causing substantial harm to media businesses, citing industry data that said search referral traffic to midsize publishers declined by 47% year over year in December 2025.

The two media outlets also accused OpenAI of diluting their trademark by generating content that falsely attributed fabricated content to The Seattle Times and Newsday.

“While we’re surprised by the lawsuit, we appreciate the importance of the Seattle Times to our region and we’re always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute,” a Microsoft spokesperson said Friday in an emailed statement.

An OpenAI spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company’s models are trained on publicly available data and “grounded in fair use, which helps hundreds of millions of people improve their daily lives and delivers benefits such as empowering human creativity, science, and medical research.”

Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into OpenAI since 2019, and it remains the primary cloud computing partner. The two companies worked closely to create the large language models behind ChatGPT, which catapulted generative AI technology into the mainstream.

Microsoft has also worked with OpenAI to develop its Copilot large language models.

Though the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI has been amended to grant more independence to the latter, Microsoft said in April that it is still a major shareholder in OpenAI.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is similar to one filed by The New York Times in 2023. The outlet accused OpenAI and Microsoft of pilfering its stories to develop AI models. The companies have argued that their generative AI technology trains on copyrighted work and generates new material, which is allowed under the “fair use” doctrine of copyright law.

This week, the Justice Department sided with the tech companies. In a Tuesday filing, the Justice Department argued that AI’s development was a matter of national interest; therefore, if a judge found that OpenAI and Microsoft had violated copyright, it would stifle “scientific progress while hindering American prosperity and economic mobility.”

The Justice Department’s filing also said that the “creative possibilities” and potential benefits of AI models “far outweigh any competitive harm” that could come from training models on content from publishers.

The Seattle Times’ Fisco said in his email that the lawsuit was “not about impeding AI innovation.”

“It is about making sure that innovation does not come at the expense of our business model,” Fisco said.

The Seattle Times’ lawsuit joins a growing list of copyright complaints against OpenAI and other AI companies, including lawsuits from publishers as well as class-action lawsuits from authors and musicians.

Two years ago, a group of daily newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital sued OpenAI over copyright infringement. Last year, a band of 35 publishers representing over 400 community newspapers sued the company as well.

Anthropic, an OpenAI rival, reached a $1.5 billion settlement with a group of authors and publishers last year. In the lawsuit, filed in 2024, lawyers representing the coalition accused Anthropic of using copyrighted books to train its Claude models.

Microsoft Philanthropies underwrites some Seattle Times journalism projects, though the news organization maintains editorial independence.

The Seattle Times Co., along with several other publishers, also received a grant from The Lenfest Institute for Journalism to hire a two-year AI fellow in 2024. The purpose of the program was to pursue projects regarding business sustainability and implementing AI throughout the organization. Microsoft and OpenAI funded the fellowship with $10 million.

The Seattle Times has used that grant for some advertising functions. The newsroom has some ChatGPT licenses to aid in data analysis.

The Seattle Times has publicly listed its policy regarding AI use within the newsroom. The newspaper may use AI tools for limited tasks — transcribing notes and analyzing data — after they go through a rigorous risk evaluation, but each instance is clearly labeled on stories in which AI tools played a significant role in story production. The Seattle Times does not use AI to generate stories.

The Seattle Times and Newsday are seeking damages as well as the destruction of all AI training sets that used their published work.

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