The Seattle Times and Newsday have officially joined the wave of media outlets suing OpenAI and Microsoft. The core of the complaint centers on the allegation that these technology companies utilized the publications' archived and current journalism to train large language models without obtaining permission or providing compensation. The plaintiffs argue that this practice constitutes copyright infringement, as their proprietary content is being used to build commercial AI products that may compete with the news organizations themselves.

This legal challenge follows similar actions taken by other major publishers, including The New York Times and various Tribune Publishing newspapers. The tech companies, OpenAI and Microsoft, have generally maintained that their use of publicly available internet data falls under the legal doctrine of 'fair use.' They argue that training AI models is a transformative process that does not violate copyright protections. While the plaintiffs characterize the unauthorized scraping of their archives as a direct threat to the sustainability of local journalism, the defendants emphasize that AI development is essential for innovation and information accessibility. As of now, the case is in its early stages, and the courts have yet to issue a definitive ruling on whether training AI on copyrighted news articles constitutes a violation of intellectual property law.