Seattle Times and Newsday Sue OpenAI and Microsoft Over a ‘Snake Eating Its Own Tail’

The Seattle Times Co. and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday, September 4, 2026, accusing the two companies of scraping hundreds of thousands of the newspapers’ articles, bypassing paywalls and ignoring terms of service, to train and operate AI products including ChatGPT and Copilot. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeks financial damages and an order requiring the destruction of copies of the papers’ work along with any training datasets or AI models built from it.

The suit leans on a vivid metaphor to make its case. “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 by competing directly with them through AI-generated substitutive content,” the complaint says. “If Defendants are allowed to succeed, independent journalism of the kind Plaintiffs produce will struggle to survive.”

What the complaint alleges

Beyond the core copyright claim, the lawsuit accuses OpenAI of diluting the Seattle Times’ and Newsday’s trademarks by generating fabricated content falsely attributed to the two papers. As evidence of direct copying, the complaint cites examples of ChatGPT reproducing the papers’ journalism nearly word for word, including an 88-word verbatim stretch from the Seattle Times’ Pulitzer-winning coverage of the Boeing 737 MAX crashes, generated after a user prompted the chatbot with nothing more than the article’s headline and web address.

Both defendants have pushed back. An OpenAI spokesperson said the company’s models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use. A Microsoft spokesperson told GeekWire the company was “surprised by the lawsuit” but “appreciate[s] the importance of the Seattle Times to our region” and is “always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute.” It isn’t clear whether licensing talks took place before the suit was filed.

Suing its own AI funders

The case is notable because the Seattle Times is suing two companies that help pay for its journalism. Microsoft Philanthropies underwrites some of the paper’s reporting projects, and in 2024 Microsoft and OpenAI jointly funded a $10 million Lenfest Institute AI fellowship that counted both the Seattle Times and Newsday among its first participating newsrooms. The Times says it has maintained editorial independence from that funding.

In a memo quoted in the paper’s own coverage of the suit, Seattle Times Co. President and CEO Alan Fisco said: “This was not an easy decision. 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.” Fisco took over as CEO on January 1, succeeding Frank Blethen, who led the paper for 40 years and remains chair of the board. Blethen’s son Ryan, a fifth-generation member of the family that has owned the Times since 1896, became publisher in the same transition.

The Seattle Times Union, which represents more than 160 of the paper’s employees, said Friday that it supports the lawsuit but noted the company has refused, in ongoing contract negotiations, to guarantee it won’t use AI to replace non-reporter newsroom jobs. “If the Seattle Times Co. truly cares about the threat AI poses to journalism’s business model, it should protect the workers who produce the copyrighted material at the heart of this case,” the union said in a statement.

A Justice Department thumb on the scale

The new suit echoes the New York Times’ original copyright case against the same two defendants, filed back in December 2023 before U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein in Manhattan, and it arrives at an awkward moment for publishers making that argument. On Tuesday, September 1, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in the Times’ case, urging Stein to rule that training large language models on copyrighted text qualifies as fair use. The DOJ argued that requiring AI companies to license copyrighted text would create an oligopoly benefiting only “the largest tech companies and legacy media outlets,” at the expense of America’s competitive position in AI, warning that “an erroneous fair use ruling would hamper competition in the market for LLMs.” A statement of interest doesn’t bind the court, and Stein will still decide the fair use question independently, but the filing marks a notable, formal intervention by the federal government in the broader fight over AI training data.

Joining a growing legal front

The Seattle Times and Newsday now join a lengthening list of publishers suing OpenAI and Microsoft over AI training. The New York Times’ case is already consolidated before Judge Stein with suits from the New York Daily News, Ziff Davis, and the Center for Investigative Reporting. On the same Friday the new suit was filed, the publishers in that consolidated case moved for summary judgment, and OpenAI and Microsoft filed a competing motion of their own.

Not every publisher has chosen litigation. OpenAI has struck licensing deals with more than a dozen outlets, including the Associated Press, News Corp, and Axel Springer. According to the Seattle Times’ own complaint, the publicly disclosed terms of three of those deals total more than $300 million combined. Whether Stein’s eventual ruling in the older, consolidated case sets a fair use precedent, or whether more newsrooms choose the licensing route the AP and Axel Springer took, will likely shape how the Seattle Times and Newsday’s own suit plays out.