Sept 4 (Reuters) – The Seattle Times and Newsday sued OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday, alleging in federal court that the tech companies copied the ‌newspapers’ journalism without permission to train their AI systems.

• The suit in the ‌U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the ​newspapers’ websites, including content behind paywalls, and incorporated articles into datasets used to train and operate products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI features.

• The newspapers, based in Seattle and Long Island, New York, said the companies’ AI products can reproduce passages from their ‌reporting, closely paraphrase articles and ⁠provide users with answers that reduce the need to visit their websites or buy subscriptions.

• “We feel strongly that we must defend our content – ⁠which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce – from being used without our consent or compensation,” Seattle Times President and CEO Alan Fisco wrote to employees, according to ​the newspaper.

• ​An spokesperson for San Francisco-based OpenAI said ​its models are trained on publicly ‌available data and grounded in fair use, without commenting specifically on the lawsuit.

• A spokesperson for Microsoft, based near Seattle in Washington state, said in an email: “While we’re surprised by the lawsuit, we appreciate the importance of local journalism and we’re always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute.”

• The Seattle Times ‌and Newsday are seeking an order requiring the destruction ​of copies of their works as well as ​training datasets or AI models incorporating ​them.

• The lawsuit echoes a case filed by the New York ‌Times in 2023, which accused OpenAI and Microsoft ​of using millions of ​newspaper articles without permission to train OpenAI’s popular chatbot. The case is ongoing, and is one of dozens brought by copyright holders against tech companies such ​as OpenAI, Anthropic and ‌Meta for what they say is misuse of their material to train AI ​systems.

(Reporting by Rishabh Jaiswal in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Natalia Bueno Rebolledo ​in Mexico City; Editing by William Mallard)