Newspaper Company Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over Article Scraping
This lawsuit represents the largest coordinated legal action by local newspapers against AI companies, aiming to bring smaller publishers to the negotiating table where earlier suits by national outlets did not.
Reporting from 1 sources: GIGAZINE.
A newspaper company that owns approximately 400 local and regional newspapers filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft on June 24, 2026, alleging unauthorized scraping of articles to train AI models like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. The plaintiffs seek damages and injunctive relief, arguing the AI boom threatens local journalism unless companies are held accountable.
The complaint, filed June 24, claims OpenAI and Microsoft scraped content from the plaintiffs' websites without permission or compensation, using it to train large language models. The plaintiffs' attorney, Matthew Platkin of the Platkin Law Firm, said the suit is the largest-scale legal effort led by local and regional newspapers. The plaintiffs argue that while generative AI has generated tens of billions in market value, none of that money has reached the content creators. They also allege the defendants circumvented paywalls to access articles. OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company's models are trained on publicly available data under fair use principles. Microsoft did not comment.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.