MANHATTAN (CN) - A nationwide group of print and digital publishers that own and operate nearly 400 newspapers sued OpenAI and Microsoft for scraping their content without permission or compensation to train artificial intelligence programs ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.

Represented by Matthew J. Platkin, who served as the attorney general of New Jersey from 2022 to 2026, the coalition of local and regional news publishers claim OpenAI and Microsoft unlawfully appropriated original news content to build their artificial intelligence products, violating the Copyright Act and jeopardizing local journalism in the United States.

"The publishers' journalism was essential to the defendants' explosive growth, and unless Defendants are held accountable for stealing, stripping and misusing the publishers' content, the AI boom Defendants orchestrated and benefit from will be a death knell for local journalism - which remains the most trusted news sources in America," the publishers wrote in their 55-page civil complaint filed Wednesday evening in Manhattan federal court.

Led by the Long Island-based publisher Richner Communications, the civil complaint accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of three separate counts of copyright infringement, seeking statutory damages, actual damages, restitution of profits and attorney's fees.

The publishers claim OpenAI and Microsoft "systematically and secretly crawled" hundreds of news websites - including content behind paywalls and other access restrictions - and copied articles, stories and other original works onto their own servers without authorization. All copyright management information associated with those works were then stripped, including ownership-establishing information like author credits, publication names, terms of use information and copyright notices.

The publishers assert such stripping of copyright management information is "an instrumental part of defendants' ingestion pipeline" that helped sever the link between copied content and its lawful copyright owners and authorizations.

They accuse the technology companies of using the stripped content to train their artificial intelligence large language models, which "memorized" that material and likely reproduced it, verbatim or near-verbatim, in response to user prompts for years.

The publishers describe Microsoft, which made an initial $1 billion investment in OpenAI in 2019, as "an indispensable partner in virtually every aspect of OpenAI's commercial enterprise."

The widespread copyright infringement occurred while the American local journalism industry remains unstable and the public deeply divided, the publishers say.

"As a Democracy Fund analysis of numerous studies demonstrates, local journalism has demonstrably increased civic participation, produced greater cohesiveness in communities and reduced public corruption," the publishers wrote in their complaint.

Representatives for OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 and its nonprofit board has continued to control the for-profit subsidiary that now develops and sells AI products. The San Francisco-based company reported in March it was heading toward an $852 billion valuation after a $122 billion fundraising round, featuring funding from Amazon, SoftBank and Nvidia.

Earlier this year, reference giants Encyclopedia Britannica and its Merriam-Webster subsidiary sued OpenAI in the Southern District of New York, claiming ChatGPT's training software engages in "massive copying" of digital publishers' copyrighted online content without authorization or remuneration.

Source: Courthouse News Service