Nearly 400 newspaper publishers have sued Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and OpenAI, alleging the companies unlawfully copied and used their copyrighted articles to train the large language models behind their AI products without permission or compensation.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, claims the practice violates federal copyright law. Benzinga contacted Microsoft and OpenAI for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
Microsoft and OpenAI are partners in developing and deploying AI systems that generate text-based responses. The publishers argue that copyrights protect their journalism and that using it to train AI models requires permission and compensation. They are seeking a court ruling that the alleged unauthorized use constitutes copyright infringement, along with an order preventing further use of their content.
The lawsuit adds to a growing wave of legal challenges from publishers, authors and other content creators, as courts weigh how copyright law applies to AI models trained on publicly available and copyrighted material.
In March, Grammarly faced a lawsuit over the alleged use of its Expert Review AI tool. Julia Angwin, a contributing opinion editor at The New York Times, alleges that the tool used her name and others’ without prior consent.
Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, is also facing a lawsuit from music rights management company BMG. According to a Rolling Stone report, BMG alleges that Anthropic used lyrics from major artists to train its chatbot without obtaining proper authorization.
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