The Seattle Times and Newsday are suing OpenAI and Microsoft over the use of their journalism to train AI models. They join a list that now includes The New York Times, The Intercept, and a growing coalition of local and national outlets. The lawsuits are structurally similar. The outcomes will probably be too. What is genuinely interesting is what the pile-on reveals about where the news industry thinks its leverage actually lives.
Copyright Suits, Training Data, and the Journalism Supply Chain
The legal argument is that AI companies ingested decades of professional reporting without compensation and used it to build products that now compete directly with the outlets that produced it. This is a legitimate grievance with real economic stakes. The complication is that copyright law was not written for this use case, and courts have so far been cautious. News organizations are betting that enough coordinated litigation creates settlement pressure before any verdict clarifies the law. It is a reasonable bet. It is also a slow one. Meanwhile, the press-versus-tech war that Sean Monahan and Alberto Cuadros mapped as a cultural proxy conflict keeps materializing in courtroom filings.
What the Lawsuits Cannot Fix
The more uncomfortable fact is that winning these suits would not restore local journalism's economic model. The advertising revenue that funded investigative reporting is gone and is not coming back regardless of how OpenAI settles. What the suits can potentially do is establish that training data has a price, which would create a licensing market. Whether that market produces enough revenue to matter for a regional paper like the Seattle Times is a separate and more pessimistic question. The AI companies built on journalism. The journalism is still contracting. The relationship between those two facts is causal in one direction and legally contested in both.