News publishers file lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement

A coalition of major news publishers has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI. They accuse the technology giants of unlawfully using copyrighted articles to train their generative AI models without permission or payment.

First reported by The Verge, the group of eight publications, owned by Alden Global Capital (AGC) — including the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News and Orlando Sentinel — claims that the companies used “millions” of their articles without authorization and without payment “to fuel the commercialization of their generative artificial intelligence products, including ChatGPT and Copilot.”

The lawsuit is the latest legal action against Microsoft and OpenAI over their alleged misuse of copyrighted material to build large language models (LLMs) that power AI technologies like ChatGPT. In the complaint, the AGC publications claim that the companies' chatbots can literally reproduce their articles shortly after publication, without providing prominent links back to the original sources.

“This lawsuit is not a battle between new technology and old technology. It is not a battle between a thriving industry and an industry in transition. It is certainly not a struggle to resolve the phalanx of social, political, moral and economic issues raised by GenAI,” the complaint reads.

“This lawsuit is about how Microsoft and OpenAI are not entitled to use copyrighted newspaper content to build their new trillion-dollar companies without paying for that content.”

The plaintiffs also accuse the AI models of “hallucinations” by attributing inaccurate reporting to their publications. They refer to OpenAI's previous admission that it “impossible” would be to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted material.

The allegations echo those made by The New York Times in a separate lawsuit filed last year. The Times claimed that Microsoft and OpenAI used nearly a century of copyrighted material to allow their AI to mimic its expressive style without a licensing agreement.

In seeking to dismiss key parts of the Times lawsuit, Microsoft accused the paper of “doomsday futurology” by suggesting that generative AI could threaten independent journalism.

The AGC publications argue that OpenAI, now valued at $90 billion after becoming a profitable company, and Microsoft — which added hundreds of billions of dollars to its market value from ChatGPT and Copilot — are benefiting from the unauthorized use of copyrighted works.

The news publishers are seeking unspecified damages and an order for Microsoft and OpenAI to destroy all GPT and LLM models that use their copyrighted content.

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