The Seattle Times and Newsday have joined the growing line of publishers taking OpenAI and Microsoft to court, filing a lawsuit that pulls no punches about what generative AI is doing to journalism. Their complaint describes the technology as “a snake eating its own tail” — a system that could “destroy the very organizations” producing the content it depends on. The language is sharp: “AI products like ChatGPT and CoPilot are touted as producers of content, but in fact they are rapacious consumers, devouring human-authored content and delivering back to the world copies and derivative imitations.”
What makes the Seattle Times case awkward is the relationship history. Microsoft and OpenAI have actually funded some of the newspaper’s journalism projects and fellowships. A Microsoft spokesperson told GeekWire the company is “surprised by the lawsuit” but remains “always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute.” That’s corporate diplomacy for: we thought we had a working relationship here.
The lawsuit lands amid a broader reckoning. The New York Times fired the opening shot back in 2023, and plenty of other publications have piled on since. But each new filing chips away at the notion that licensing deals will quietly paper over the underlying copyright question. Publishers aren’t just asking for checks anymore — they’re arguing the entire training model is structurally extractive.
Here’s what I keep coming back to: OpenAI and Microsoft have been signing content deals with major publishers at a steady clip, positioning those agreements as proof the industry can coexist with AI. But those deals cover a fraction of the content already scraped and ingested. If courts eventually side with publishers on the ingestion question, the licensing strategy becomes a retrofit rather than a foundation. The Seattle Times filing suggests smaller regional players won’t sit quietly while the big national brands negotiate their exits.
