Legal & Compliance

The Seattle Times Company and Newsday LLC sued OpenAI, eight affiliated OpenAI entities and Microsoft Corporation on 4 September 2026 in the Southern District of New York, docketed as No. 1:26-cv-07644. The 38-page complaint pleads seven counts — direct and vicarious copyright infringement, two DMCA claims over stripped copyright management information, and federal, Washington and New York trademark dilution — and asks the court to destroy the training datasets and models built on the plaintiffs’ journalism. This is a working read of the filing: the datasets named, the 88-word Boeing 737 MAX passage a model returned verbatim, the 47% referral traffic collapse behind the harm claim, the $300 million licensing market the plaintiffs were left out of, and where the case sits against the consolidated New York Times litigation that reached summary judgment the same day.