The Seattle Times and Newsday Are Asking for More Than Money From OpenAI

The Lawsuit That Goes Beyond Money

Seattle Times and Newsday aren’t just asking OpenAI and Microsoft for money. They want the AI models themselves destroyed — the training datasets, the weights, the copies of their journalism embedded inside systems that were built on their work.

It is a remarkably aggressive ask. Most copyright cases seek damages or licensing terms. This one asks courts to order the erasure of products that would not exist without the plaintiffs’ content in the first place.

The lawsuit, filed recently and reported by The Verge, accuses OpenAI of using journalism from both outlets as training data without permission and reproducing passages from their reporting when users query its models. Microsoft is named because Copilot runs on OpenAI’s technology. The publishers are joining nearly 400 local newspapers that have already sued both companies over similar claims, arguing that AI chatbots siphon off the traffic and subscription revenue that funds investigative reporting.

OpenAI and Microsoft have not responded to requests for comment.

Who Actually Stands to Win

Let’s look at what each side actually wants, because the stakes are asymmetrical.

Seattle Times and Newsday want the models destroyed or, at minimum, forced out of existence through court order. For OpenAI and Microsoft, that is an existential threat to entire product lines. Copilot is now embedded across the Microsoft ecosystem — in Office, Windows, and enterprise tools. ChatGPT has hundreds of millions of users. Neither company is going to settle this quietly.

But the plaintiffs’ position is also fragile. Courts have not yet ruled definitively on whether training AI models on copyrighted material constitutes fair use. The Supreme Court has not taken up the question. Lower courts are split. The New York Times has a similar lawsuit against OpenAI — and the case is years from resolution. The publishers have leverage in public narrative, not in legal certainty.

What’s interesting is that The Seattle Times and Newsday are mid-market publishers with significant regional influence but not the endless war chests of the New York Times Company or News Corp. Their survival is genuinely at stake. If AI chatbots can answer questions that used to drive readers to their sites, the business model fractures. That makes this lawsuit feel less like a corporate power play and more like an act of desperation.

What English-Language Readers Miss About This Case

This isn’t just a US story. The pattern repeats globally. Publishers across Europe, Asia, and Latin America are watching these cases closely, knowing their own languages and copyright frameworks will face the same pressures. The EU’s Digital Services Act and upcoming AI Act create different regulatory terrain, but the core question — who owns the right to train on cultural and journalistic output — is universal.

The Seattle Times, in particular, carries weight beyond Washington state. It has won Pulitzer Prizes. Its investigative work sets standards for regional journalism nationwide. When a paper of that caliber says the current AI model is built on uncompensated extraction, the argument gains moral authority that pure economics cannot match.

Newsday, meanwhile, represents a different kind of vulnerability. It survived bankruptcy and ownership changes. It was acquired by Digital First Media and later by Alden Global Capital. Its very existence has been contested. A lawsuit that could reshape the economics of AI training is not abstract for a publisher that has nearly vanished before.

The Real Question: Can Copyright Keep Pace?

Copyright law was written for a world of books, newspapers, and broadcast signals. It was not written for systems that ingest billions of words, find patterns, and generate new text without reproducing any single sentence.

The plaintiffs argue that OpenAI did something closer to plagiarism than to inspiration. Passages appear in ChatGPT responses that trace back to specific articles. That is qualitatively different from a model learning general writing styles or factual patterns. If courts accept that argument, it changes everything.

But OpenAI’s defense is equally coherent. The company argues that training data is not copied — it is transformed. The models do not store articles. They learn statistical relationships. Asking for the models to be destroyed is like asking a chef to burn down the kitchen because you don’t agree with how they used your recipe.

No court has resolved that tension yet.

What Happens Next

Several outcomes are plausible, and none is simple.

If the publishers win, OpenAI and Microsoft face a choice: rebuild their models from scratch without copyrighted training data, or negotiate licenses with virtually every major publisher in the English-speaking world. That would be a fundamental restructuring of the AI industry — and likely a costly one.

If they lose, the precedent would cement the current model: AI companies can ingest published content freely, and publishers get nothing beyond whatever voluntary licensing deals they can individually negotiate. That outcome accelerates the decline of funded journalism.

The most likely path is something messier. Settlements with licensing agreements, gradual shifts in how models are trained, and a redefined relationship between publishers and tech platforms. But the legal uncertainty alone is already reshaping behavior. Some AI companies have quietly begun removing content from training data or negotiating deals. The threat of destruction orders — even if unlikely to succeed — is forcing the conversation forward.

The Stakes for Local Journalism

The broader story here is not about OpenAI or even the two specific plaintiffs. It is about whether local and regional journalism can survive the age of generative AI.

Hundreds of newspapers have closed in the past decade. The ones that remain face a new competitor that can summarize their reporting in seconds and present it without a link, a byline, or a subscription wall. The ~400 newspapers that joined the suit against OpenAI and Microsoft represent a行业 fighting for its life.

Seattle Times and Newsday are asking the courts to intervene where the market has not. Whether the courts will do so — and whether the remedy they choose actually helps publishers survive — remains the open question.

The models will not be destroyed tomorrow. But the lawsuit forces a reckoning that the industry had been avoiding: someone has to pay for the content that makes these systems possible.