A coalition of publishers sued OpenAI and Microsoft over scraping content without consent

AI companies often rely on readily available internet content to train their chatbots and provide users with instant answers. This method of AI training is fast and relatively inexpensive, but using a website’s content without permission or compensation is not something publishers like to see, and this is exactly why Microsoft and OpenAI are now being sued.

As reported by Bloomberg, a group of publishers that collectively own nearly 400 newspapers has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The coalition argues that the two companies scraped their content to build AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Copilot without paying any compensation.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, argues that while AI products have generated billions of dollars in market value using publishers’ work, none of that value has been shared with the publishers. The plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages and injunctive relief for alleged copyright infringement and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

“Defendants systematically and secretly crawled the Publishers’ websites—including content behind paywalls and other access restrictions—and copied the Publishers’ articles, stories, and other original works onto their own servers without authorization,” the complaint states.

The publishers also described the AI boom as a “death knell for local journalism” if AI companies that scrape content for free are not held accountable. Former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin and his law firm, Platkin LLP, are representing the publishers.

“Our models empower innovation, are trained on publicly available data, and are grounded in fair use,” OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri told Bloomberg.

This is not the first lawsuit involving the unauthorized use of publishers’ content by AI firms, but it is one of the largest coalitions ever formed against the free use of content by AI chatbots. In 2024, OpenAI and Microsoft also faced a similar lawsuit from eight newspapers that claimed AI products were benefiting from their content without permission.