The Seattle Times Company and Newsday LLC v. OpenAI, Inc. et al. and Microsoft Corporation is a suit filed on September 4, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by two regional newspaper publishers against nine OpenAI entities and Microsoft. It pleads seven counts: direct and vicarious copyright infringement, two DMCA copyright-management-information counts, and three trademark-dilution counts under federal law, Washington's RCW 19.77.160 and New York General Business Law § 360-L (Complaint — The Seattle Times Company and Newsday LLC v. OpenAI, Inc. et al. and Microsoft Corporation (S.D.N.Y., September 4, 2026)).
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Case number | 1:26-cv-07644 (S.D.N.Y.) |
| Plaintiffs | The Seattle Times Company (Delaware corporation, principal place of business Seattle); Newsday LLC (Delaware LLC, principal place of business Melville, N.Y.) |
| Defendants | OpenAI, Inc.; OpenAI GP, LLC; OpenAI, LLC; OpenAI OpCo, LLC; OpenAI Global LLC; OAI Corporation; OpenAI Holdings, LLC; OpenAI Foundation; OpenAI Group PBC; Microsoft Corporation |
| Counsel for plaintiffs | Lacy H. Koonce, III and Brendan T. Kehoe, Klaris Law PLLC |
| Filed | September 4, 2026 |
| Status | Active — complaint filed; no response on the docket as of September 5, 2026 |
Background
The Seattle Times was founded in 1886 and has been under Blethen family ownership since 1896; the complaint pleads 11 Pulitzer Prizes since 1950 and a metered digital paywall since 2013, now allowing one free pageview. Newsday was founded in 1940 and pleads 19 Pulitzer Prizes since 1954 and, since August 2022, a hard paywall under which no Newsday-produced editorial text is available to non-subscribers. Both are mid-sized regional publishers rather than national outlets, a distinction the complaint uses in its harm allegations (Complaint — The Seattle Times Company and Newsday LLC v. OpenAI, Inc. et al. and Microsoft Corporation (S.D.N.Y., September 4, 2026)).
Claims
The copyright and DMCA theories track those in the consolidated publisher litigation: reproduction and storage of the plaintiffs' articles to build training datasets and to train, fine-tune and ground the models behind ChatGPT, Copilot and Bing Chat; removal of copyright management information; and distribution of works from which CMI had been removed. The complaint also pleads copying for retrieval-augmented generation, both through web crawls building indices and through direct scrapes in response to user queries about current events.
The distinguishing feature is the dilution pleading. The complaint asserts registered word marks — THE SEATTLE TIMES (four registrations, April 30, 2019, pleaded as incontestable following Section 8 and 15 acceptance in August 2025) and NEWSDAY (Registration No. 2,047,787, March 25, 1997) — and pleads both blurring, on the ground that model outputs associate the marks with content the plaintiffs did not produce, and tarnishment, on the ground that the products misattribute hallucinated content to the plaintiffs or attribute plaintiffs' content to others.
Evidence of verbatim reproduction is pleaded at paragraph 66, which reproduces an article from the Seattle Times' Pulitzer-winning series on the 2019 Boeing 737 MAX crash and states that the model output 88 consecutive words verbatim from a prompt containing only the headline and URL. Paragraph 67 sets two Newsday passages beside model output.
Relief sought
Statutory or actual damages and profits at the plaintiffs' election under 17 U.S.C. § 504; damages for each § 1202 violation; a permanent injunction; impoundment and/or destruction under 17 U.S.C. § 503 of all copies of the plaintiffs' works "and all LLMs and training datasets incorporating Plaintiffs' works or derivatives thereof"; and, on the dilution counts, an accounting of profits, treble damages and attorneys' fees. A jury trial is demanded.
Reactions
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was "surprised by the lawsuit" and is "always happy to sit down and explore solutions to this type of dispute." Seattle Times Co. president and chief executive Alan Fisco wrote in a memo that "this was not an easy decision" (Source: geekwire.com).
The filing came three days after the Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in the consolidated proceeding urging the same court to hold that training AI models on written works is fair use, and on the same day the publishers, OpenAI and Microsoft filed cross-motions for summary judgment in that proceeding (Statement of Interest of the United States — In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation (September 1, 2026); Source: insideaipolicy.com).
Relation to the consolidated litigation
The complaint pleads that the defendants consented to jurisdiction and venue in the district in four earlier publisher cases — NYT v. Microsoft, Raw Story Media v. OpenAI, The Intercept Media v. OpenAI and Daily News v. Microsoft — all consolidated in In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, No. 25-md-03143 (NYT v. Microsoft, OpenAI et al.). Whether this case is transferred into that multidistrict proceeding is not resolved on the docket as of September 5, 2026.
The complaint also pleads OpenAI's licensing agreements with more than a dozen news and media organisations — naming, on information and belief, the Associated Press, News Corp, Axios, Axel Springer, The Atlantic, the Financial Times, Dotdash Meredith and Vox Media — and states that the disclosed terms of three reflect payments exceeding $300 million, offered as evidence that a licensing market exists and that a licence was required.
Relationships
- instance-of: AI Copyright — the publisher-plaintiff line of cases.
- related: NYT v. Microsoft, OpenAI et al. — the consolidated proceeding the complaint invokes.
- related: OpenAI; Microsoft — defendants.
- related: Media, Journalism & Entertainment — AI Deployment — the affected sector.
- anchor-sources: Complaint — The Seattle Times Company and Newsday LLC v. OpenAI, Inc. et al. and Microsoft Corporation (S.D.N.Y., September 4, 2026).