US Newspapers File Lawsuit Against OpenAI And Microsoft Over AI Chatbots
A consortium of eight US newspapers, including prominent names such as The New York Daily News and The Chicago Tribune, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in a New York federal court. The lawsuit alleges copyright infringement related to the training data used for the development of the ChatGPT and Copilot chatbots.
Owned by Alden Global Capital, a Florida-based hedge fund, the newspapers claim that their copyrighted articles were unlawfully utilized without permission or compensation to train the artificial intelligence models powering these chatbots.
According to the filing, OpenAI and Microsoft are accused of appropriating millions of copyrighted articles to fuel the commercialization of their AI products, including ChatGPT and Copilot. The lawsuit asserts that the defendants must seek consent from the publishers and fairly compensate them for the use of their content.
Furthermore, the newspapers claim that OpenAI and Microsoft misrepresented or inaccurately attributed reporting from their publications in certain instances.
Among the newspapers joining the lawsuit are The Orlando Sentinel, The Sun Sentinel of Florida, The San Jose Mercury News, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register, and The St. Paul Pioneer Press.
In response, OpenAI stated that it values constructive partnerships with news organizations worldwide but did not directly address the allegations outlined in the lawsuit.
Several news outlets have established partnerships with OpenAI, including The Associated Press, Financial Times, Germany’s Axel Springer, Le Monde from France, and Prisa Media from Spain.
This legal action mirrors a similar lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI in December, which accused the organization of misappropriating content for training AI models. OpenAI has defended its practices, citing fair use of publicly available data and accusing The New York Times of violating user guidelines to generate content for its case.
Microsoft declined to comment on the lawsuit.
