Seattle Times and Newsday joined a growing list of publishers suing OpenAI and Microsoft over training data, as Microsoft tells courts Copilot rarely reproduces news text.
The Seattle Times and Newsday filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging their journalism was used without permission to train AI models, adding to a lengthening list of publisher plaintiffs. In a separate filing on the NYT case, Microsoft argued Copilot 'virtually never' reproduces full sentences from articles or books, pushing back directly on the substitution-harm argument publishers rely on.
The dueling claims set up a factual dispute courts will need to resolve: how often, and how substantially, do AI outputs actually reproduce copyrighted text versus merely reflecting patterns learned from it.
The outcome will set the licensing price floor — or ceiling — for every publisher negotiating with AI labs, and determine whether 'fair use for training' survives as a legal doctrine in the US. Media companies without direct licensing deals are betting litigation gets them better terms than negotiation; Microsoft's filing shows labs think the evidence favors them.
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