Microsoft (MSFT) and OpenAI are being sued by nearly 400 newspapers

The suit claims that the generative artificial intelligence products are scraping the publishers' content without permission.

The publishers of nearly 400 newspapers have filed a lawsuit against Microsoft (MSFT) and OpenAI regarding alleged copyright infringement. The lawsuit claims that the generative artificial intelligence companies have scraped the publishers’ content without permission or compensation.

Reporting by Bloomberg Law on June 24, 2026, drew attention to a lawsuit filed by nearly 400 newspapers against Microsoft and OpenAI for allegedly scraping their content “without permission or compensation.”

The court docket states that the lawsuit concerns the “systematic and willful theft of hundreds of thousands of copyrighted articles,” without the permission of the publishers. It goes on to state that Microsoft “secretly crawled” the websites, including content behind paywalls, and copied the information to its own servers.

The file goes on to note that since the founding of the United States, the U.S. Constitution has “charged Congress with protecting authors’ and publishers’ exclusive rights in their work.” It claims that OpenAI has slowly withdrawn its transparency with each new iteration of GPT, pointing out that the initial versions were open source and showed what datasets were used while future versions would include “very little, if any, details on architectural specifications or training data sources.”

OpenAI has even admitted that training AI models would be “impossible” without using copyrighted materials. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has even stated that the company would “pay the costs incurred if you face legal claims around copyright infringement.”

This latest lawsuit against OpenAI is one of many against it and other companies behind this massive push for generative artificial intelligence. George R.R. Martin, author behind critically acclaimed series A Song of Ice and Fire, sued OpenAI over copyright infringement in 2023. In 2024, Conde Nast ordered a cease and desist against AI search engine Perplexity.

While all of these lawsuits are going on, tech companies continue to invest heavily into the generative AI market. Sony has recently issued a statement on how AI will evolve the PlayStation experience, Anthropic had a $65 billion Series H funding round, and Nvidia is expecting $91 billion in revenue in Q2 FY27. Meanwhile, hardware prices have continued to skyrocket.

With today’s news of the lawsuit against OpenAI, it will be interesting to see how the company handles its IPO, which it confidentially filed for roughly two weeks ago. Stay tuned to Shacknews to hear how all of this plays out.

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Shacknews staff does not use generative artificial intelligence (AI) in their content. Shacknews strictly prohibits the use of its content for AI training or to generate text, including text in the style or format used for this publication. Shacknews reserves all rights to this work.