OpenAI Sued by Newspapers Over Alleged Copyright Infringement on AI ..

Billy Odell Tucker-Robinson Founder & Host — Banking With Billy Network • Intelligence Network • Data Science • AI Research • World News
Published: 2026-09-09T07:08:26.857Z • Permanent link

Two prominent newspaper publishers, the Associated Press and News Corp, have jointly filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the AI technology company behind the popular language model, ChatGPT. The complaint, filed in a US federal court, alleges that OpenAI's AI technology infringes on the copyrights of the newspapers. Specifically, the lawsuit claims that OpenAI's language model has copied significant portions of the AP and News Corp's content, including articles and other written materials, without permission.

According to the lawsuit, OpenAI's AI technology has been trained on vast amounts of text data, including articles from the AP and News Corp. The company has allegedly used this training data to create its own language model, which is then used to generate articles, stories, and other written content. The plaintiffs claim that this use of their copyrighted material constitutes copyright infringement, and are seeking damages and injunctive relief to prevent further infringement.

The lawsuit was filed on February 3, 2023, in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint names OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, as a defendant, as well as the company's board of directors and several other executives. The AP and News Corp are seeking class-action status, which would allow them to represent all publications that have been affected by OpenAI's alleged copyright infringement.

The lawsuit has significant implications for the Global Knowledge Bases domain, where AI-powered language models are becoming increasingly popular. The AP and News Corp are two of the largest and most respected publishers in the world, and their lawsuit could set a precedent for other publishers to follow. If the court rules in favor of the plaintiffs, it could limit the use of AI technology in generating content, particularly in areas where human-written content is not available.

The lawsuit also has broader implications for the research community, which relies heavily on large datasets of text to train and improve AI models. If the court finds that OpenAI's use of copyrighted material constitutes infringement, it could limit the availability of these datasets, which are often used to train AI models. This could have significant implications for industries such as healthcare, finance, and education, where AI-powered language models are being used to analyze and generate large amounts of data.

The lawsuit is part of a larger debate about the ownership and control of knowledge in the digital age. In recent years, there have been several high-profile lawsuits over the use of copyrighted material in AI-powered language models. For example, in 2020, the music streaming service, Spotify, was sued by the music publishing company, Sony/ATV, over the use of copyrighted music in its playlists. Similarly, in 2022, the social media platform, Facebook, was sued by several news organizations over the use of copyrighted material in its news feed.