(29 Jun 2026) Newspaper publishers across the country are suing OpenAI and Microsoft for allegedly scraping their websites to train their flagship artificial intelligence models.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Wednesday, alleges that by using unlicensed and paywalled content to train versions of ChatGPT, OpenAI and Microsoft have profited from the publishers’ written work. Those actions have caused newsrooms to lose out on advertising and subscription revenues, the complaint alleges, by deterring people from accessing the content directly from the plaintiffs. (Microsoft does not own OpenAI, but it maintains a significant minority stake in the company and owns the computing infrastructure used to power OpenAI’s large language models.)
Thirty-five newspaper publishing companies, largely independent and locally owned, have signed on as co-plaintiffs. They represent nearly 400 news outlets across 33 states, including three California papers: the Tahoe Daily Tribune in South Lake Tahoe, the Sierra Sun in Truckee and the Needles Desert Star in Needles.
Read more here.
