Recently, a number of local news publishers filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the Federal Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that the two companies systematically scraped their copyright-protected news content without authorisation to train the AI models ChatGPT and Copilot. This lawsuit marks yet another round of legal action taken by news publishers against AI companies, following similar moves by The New York Times and other news organisations.

On 24 June 2026, more than 30 publishers led by Richner Communications Inc. filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs operate nearly 400 newspapers across the United States, including the *New York Amsterdam News*. The statement of claim alleges that the defendants “used automated systems to systematically and covertly scrape the publishers’ websites—including content behind paywalls and other restricted-access content—and copied articles, reports and other original works onto their own servers without authorisation”. During the scraping process, the defendants’ systems stripped away copyright management information relating to author attribution, copyright notices and publication titles.

The publishers point out that technology companies have used this content to build “some of the most valuable businesses in human history”, whilst the publishers themselves have received no compensation. The plaintiffs claim that they have invested tens of billions of dollars in protecting their works—including the implementation of paywalls—yet the defendants have taken it all away.

A chart in the statement of claim shows that WebText, the dataset used by OpenAI to train GPT-2, contains millions of basic text units, of which approximately 891,256 originate from websites operated by AIM Media Indiana Operating, and 550,205 from websites owned by CherryRoad Media Inc. The publishers also allege that ChatGPT generates near-verbatim copies when responding to user prompts, directly replicating their works.

Platkin, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, stated in a declaration: “This lawsuit represents a group of publishers who publish hundreds of local and regional newspapers, and aims to ensure that these local publications, which create original content, receive meaningful protection in the age of AI—not to stifle AI innovation, but to ensure that innovation takes place within fair and lawful boundaries.”

OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri responded in a statement: “Our models drive innovation, are trained on publicly available data, and operate within the framework of fair use.” A representative for Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.