Two more newsrooms join the case against OpenAI and Microsoft

The Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the companies methodically scraped articles in a way that bypasses paywalls. The EU’s general-purpose AI code commits signatories not to circumvent access restrictions, naming subscription models and paywalls specifically.

The Seattle Times and Newsday have jointly sued OpenAI and Microsoft over the training of AI models on their journalism. The two called generative AI “a snake eating its own tail“, Engadget reported.

The complaint alleges the companies were methodically scraping news articles in a way that bypasses paywalls. That is a claim about how the material was obtained, not only about what was done with it.

It says the result offers readers an AI-generated alternative to the articles themselves, cutting traffic and digital advertising revenue.

It also alleges the models hallucinate, attributing false information to the two outlets, and that copyright management information was stripped from articles.

They join the New York Times, which sued in 2023, and the 400 local newspapers already in the litigation. Others, including AP and Vox Media, licensed their archives to OpenAI instead.

The timing is pointed. Microsoft asked the same court on the same day to reject the two theories this complaint rests on, lost licensing fees and market dilution.

Of the four allegations, the paywall one travels furthest. TNW covered Microsoft’s fair use brief this week, and it argues about books rather than about how pages were reached.

In the United States it is a claim about circumvention and about the terms under which a page was accessed. In Europe it is something a company has already promised not to do.

The copyright chapter of the EU’s general-purpose AI code commits signatories not to circumvent effective technological measures restricting access, with specific attention to subscription models and paywalls, citing the 2001 copyright directive.

The same chapter requires crawlers to read and follow robots.txt, and to exclude sites that courts or public authorities have found to infringe persistently on a commercial scale.

OpenAI is a signatory. The code has applied since August 2025, so it does not reach conduct alleged to predate it, and whether a paywall counts as a valid reservation of rights is unsettled.

The copyright directive requires reservations by machine-readable means for online content, and no court has ruled on whether a paywall qualifies. What is settled is that fair use has no European equivalent.

A German court held in July that works memorised in model parameters infringe at the point of storage, in a case brought by GEMA. European publishers making the same complaint would start from a different place.