A coalition of local and regional newspaper publishers sued OpenAI and Microsoft in Manhattan federal court, accusing the companies of using copyrighted journalism without permission to train ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.
The lawsuit is the latest in a growing wave of litigation against AI companies, following separate cases brought against Perplexity AI by CNN, The New York Times and Reddit, as well as a joint lawsuit from Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster.
The lawsuit, led by Long Island-based Richner Communications, represents publishers that own nearly 400 newspapers across the United States. The complaint alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft copied hundreds of thousands of articles, including material from local news websites and paywalled pages, without licensing the content or compensating the publishers.
The publishers claim the companies stored the articles on their own servers and used them to train large language models. They also allege that copyright management information, including bylines, publication names, terms of use and copyright notices, was removed during the process.
The suit brings claims for copyright infringement and alleged violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The publishers are seeking damages, profits linked to the alleged infringement, legal fees and other relief.
Matthew Platkin, the former New Jersey attorney general whose firm represents the publishers, said local reporting remains difficult to replace. “AI systems do not critically evaluate city council and community meetings,” he said. “Local reporters do.”
OpenAI has rejected similar claims in other cases and says its models are trained on publicly available data under fair use principles. Bloomberg Law reported that Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The case could become a major test of how courts value local journalism in the AI era, and whether technology companies must pay publishers when news content is used to build commercial AI tools.
