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

In the rapidly evolving AI landscape, companies frequently turn to the vast reservoir of online content to train their chatbots, delivering instant responses to users. While this approach is swift and cost‑effective, it raises significant concerns for publishers who are wary of having their proprietary material harvested without permission or remuneration—an issue now at the center of a fresh legal battle involving Microsoft and OpenAI.

Bloomberg reports that a coalition of publishers, representing almost 400 newspapers, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The group alleges that the tech giants scraped their content to fuel AI models such as ChatGPT and Copilot, all without providing any compensation.

The complaint, lodged in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, contends that although AI products have generated billions of dollars in market value using publishers’ work, none of that value has been shared with the original content creators. The plaintiffs are demanding 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 have warned that the rapid rise of artificial intelligence could spell the end of local journalism if companies that scrape content without permission are not held liable.

Representing the publishers is former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin and his firm, Platkin LLP.

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

This lawsuit marks the largest coalition ever assembled to challenge the unlicensed use of news content by AI chatbots, following a similar 2024 legal action that saw OpenAI and Microsoft sued by eight newspapers claiming their material was being exploited without consent.