Microsoft-backed (MSFT) OpenAI is being sued by The Seattle Times and Newsday over claims the company improperly used their content to train their language models, news outlets reported on Friday.

The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the newspapers' websites, including paywalled content, and incorporated articles into datasets used to train and operate products including ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI features, according to Reuters.

The two news outlets are seeking an injunction requiring the destruction of copies of the work being used to train OpenAI datasets, the report said.

An OpenAI spokesperson said its models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use, without specifically commenting on the lawsuit, according to Reuters. A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was surprised by the lawsuit and was willing to discuss potential solutions with the newspapers, Reuters reported.

OpenAI did not immediately reply to MT Newswires' request for comment.

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