Seattle Times and Newsday are the latest publications to sue OpenAI and Microsoft

TechCrunch reports that The Seattle Times and Newsday have sued OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged use of their journalism to train AI systems. The complaint frames generative AI as “a snake eating its own tail” that could leave the journalism industry “broken beyond repair,” casting ChatGPT and Copilot as commercial consumers of human-authored work that return copies and derivative imitations.

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023; other publishers have followed as that case continued. What makes this filing stand out, on TechCrunch’s reporting, is the funding relationship: Microsoft and OpenAI have supported some of The Seattle Times’ journalism projects and fellowships. A Microsoft spokesperson told GeekWire the company was “surprised by the lawsuit” but remains “always happy to sit down and explore solutions.”

Signal Desk’s read: the funding history is the story, not the rhetoric. Calling AI a snake is litigation theater. Suing a pair of companies that have underwritten your newsroom projects is a different signal — it says the sponsorship relationship never bought peace on training data, and that publishers will keep treating grants and lawsuits as parallel tracks.

The under-stated tension is reciprocity. If Microsoft and OpenAI funded journalism while scraping (or licensing) the same ecosystem’s archives, regional papers have a sharper moral claim than pure freeloading narratives allow — and a messier commercial one. Funders will read this as proof that goodwill spending does not immunize them; publishers will read Microsoft’s “surprised” line as naive.

Expect this suit to be less about novel law than about settlement leverage and discovery pressure stacked onto the Times docket. The over-stated risk is treating every new plaintiff as proof the industry is already “broken beyond repair.” The likelier near-term outcome is more filings, more venue shopping, and more private licensing talks that never reach the complaint’s apocalyptic register.

The sharper read for buyers and labs: sponsorship of newsrooms is not a copyright license, and “happy to sit down” language after a surprise suit is how companies buy time while the precedent fight stays with the Times.

Publisher suits against OpenAI and Microsoft have proliferated since The New York Times’ 2023 case. TechCrunch’s write-up is brief; the load-bearing facts are the Seattle Times/Newsday filing, the “snake eating its own tail” framing in the complaint, the prior Times suit, the funding/fellowship relationship, and Microsoft’s GeekWire comment.