Nearly 400 US newspapers sue Microsoft and OpenAI over unauthorized use of articles to train AI

A coalition representing nearly 400 U.S. newspapers filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York on Wednesday. They accuse Microsoft and OpenAI of scraping their websites without permission to train AI models like Copilot and ChatGPT, violating copyright and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The lawsuit says the companies secretly copied articles and other original works to their servers, stripping copyright info, and used them to train large language models. The plaintiffs argue these AI products, built on publishers' content, generated billions in market value for the defendants while publishers got nothing. Former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin called it the biggest legal action by local and regional newspapers. OpenAI said its training uses publicly available data under fair use. Microsoft didn't comment.