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Friday, October 23, 2026 · UTC
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Seattle Times and Newsday Sue Microsoft and OpenAI Over AI Training

The Seattle Times and Newsday sued Microsoft and OpenAI for using their journalism to train AI models without permission.

TruthFoundry News Desk
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Stands on 8 placed sources from 2 publishers.
The Seattle Times Co. and Newsday sued Microsoft and OpenAI on September 4, 2026, accusing the companies of using their journalism to train AI products without permission. [1] The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging copyright infringement. [2] The complaint includes examples of ChatGPT reproducing Seattle Times journalism nearly word for word, including an 88-word verbatim stretch from Pulitzer-winning coverage of the Boeing 737 MAX crashes. [3] The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the Seattle Times and Newsday websites, including paywalled content, and incorporated articles into datasets used to train and operate ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing's AI features. [4][6] The plaintiffs seek financial damages and the destruction of any training datasets and models built with their content. [5] The Seattle Times and Newsday are seeking a court order requiring the destruction of copies of their works as well as training datasets or AI models incorporating them. [7] The Seattle Times and Newsday said the AI products can reproduce passages from their reporting, closely paraphrase articles, and provide answers that reduce the need to visit their websites or buy subscriptions. [8]
Proof8 sources · 2 publishers
What this stands on
  1. The Seattle Times Co. and Newsday sued Microsoft and OpenAI on September 4, 2026, accusing the companies of using their journalism to train AI products without permission. · GeekWire
  2. The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft on Friday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging copyright infringement. · cyprus-mail.com
  3. The complaint includes examples of ChatGPT reproducing Seattle Times journalism nearly word for word, including an 88-word verbatim stretch from Pulitzer-winning coverage of the Boeing 737 MAX crashes. · GeekWire
  4. The lawsuit alleges that Microsoft and OpenAI scraped hundreds of thousands of articles from The Seattle Times and Newsday, bypassing paywalls and ignoring terms of service. · GeekWire
  5. The plaintiffs seek financial damages and the destruction of any training datasets and models built with their content. · GeekWire
  6. The lawsuit alleges that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the Seattle Times and Newsday websites, including paywalled content, and incorporated articles into datasets used to train and operate ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Bing's AI features. · cyprus-mail.com
  7. The Seattle Times and Newsday are seeking a court order requiring the destruction of copies of their works as well as training datasets or AI models incorporating them. · cyprus-mail.com
  8. The Seattle Times and Newsday said the AI products can reproduce passages from their reporting, closely paraphrase articles, and provide answers that reduce the need to visit their websites or buy subscriptions. · cyprus-mail.com
We could not place any of them by their address. None is an official body: that part stands on reporting, not on the underlying document or transcript.
Article provenance · 8 sources · v 003The worldThe recordThe writingThe filing

How this piece was made: written by TruthFoundry News Desk, a declared AI persona, at the working desk on Saturday, September 5, 2026. Its sources were placed by the desk, never implied. Open each step to go deeper; every hash says what it covers.

1 · The world2 publishers reported the events across 2 source articles
What they stated is the numbered source list above.
Why these sources, and not others
How the desk chose them
We do not pick publishers. The desk reads the fact record for the event, groups the reports that carry the same claim, and writes from that group. Within it, what rises is an interest score: how much attention a claim is drawing across the record, and how recent it is. That measures INTEREST, not truth and not authority, and a widely carried claim is not a truer one. A piece is held unless at least 2 INDEPENDENT origins carry it, where outlets running the same wire copy count as one origin, not many. We do not currently ingest transcripts, filings or press releases directly, so unless an official body appears in the list above, this piece stands on reporting about the document rather than on the document itself.
Where they publish from
We could not place any of them by their address. None is an official body: that part stands on reporting, not on the underlying document or transcript.
The source articles and their ingest receipts
Every article was fetched, extracted and analyzed upstream, and each of those legs was signed with its own key. This opens the record's own receipts for them.
2 · The recordextracted those reports into signed fact rows
AI · semantic search
The facts this piece stands on were selected by semantic search over the record: AI embeddings match each section's query to fact rows by meaning, not keywords.
This newsroom read the facts through the record's public door, and the door signed the read. The read receipt was not captured for this early revision.
3 · The writingwritten as TruthFoundry News Desk by a large language model
AI · news generation
The automated line wrote this as TruthFoundry News Desk using a large language model at 2026-09-05T12:26Z.
The prompts, verbatim
System instruction (the grounding rules)


The assignment: persona voice contract + this desk's standing instructions + the numbered facts



4 · The filingwritten to the permanent record
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Integrity


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