Seattle Times and Newsday ask a court to destroy OpenAI models
Evan / Policy and Open Source desk
Two regional newspapers are asking for something beyond money: a court order to wipe the models.
What the complaint says
The Seattle Times Co. and Newsday filed a federal copyright and trademark complaint against OpenAI and Microsoft in the Southern District of New York on September 4. The papers allege their content, including articles behind paywalls, was scraped into datasets used to train and operate ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot and AI features in Bing.
The remedy request is the notable part. Alongside unspecified damages, the complaint asks for “impoundment and/or destruction” of the datasets and the AI models that include the outlets’ articles.
The traffic number carrying the case
The complaint cites industry data showing search referral traffic to midsize publishers fell 47% year over year by December 2025. The argument: readers ask a chatbot, the chatbot answers with the newspaper’s reporting, and no one clicks through to the source that paid for it.
OpenAI’s position is that training on publicly available data is fair use. Microsoft said it was surprised by the suit and is happy to explore solutions.
The filing joins a widening line of publisher and rights-holder suits against AI labs, and it escalates the standard ask. Damages can be settled; a destruction order, if one were ever granted, could not be paid off.
Sources
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