According to newly released court documents, OpenAI and Microsoft executives privately admitted that their AI products could replace articles published by media outlets, and that this technology poses a threat to the news industry. This evidence comes from internal documents unsealed in the copyright lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft.

The lawsuit, which began in December 2023, accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of using millions of The New York Times articles to train AI models without permission. In March 2025, Judge Sidney H. Stein dismissed most of the defendants' motions to dismiss, allowing the core copyright infringement claims to proceed. In June 2026, The New York Times sought to amend its complaint, accusing Microsoft of encouraging OpenAI to use the newspaper's articles without authorization.

The unsealed documents reveal internal awareness within OpenAI and Microsoft about AI's ability to replace news content. Bloomberg Law reported that executives from both companies privately acknowledged their AI tools are substitutes for news articles. At the same time, Microsoft executives have expressed concerns in recent years about OpenAI's use of paywalled articles from The New York Times and other publishers.

This internal understanding contrasts with the public defense positions of the two companies. OpenAI has consistently argued that using publicly available data to train models falls under fair use. In September 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice even submitted a brief supporting OpenAI, stating that using copyrighted text to train AI models typically does not constitute infringement, marking the first time the U.S. government has taken a stance in an AI copyright case.

However, the wave of lawsuits from publishers continues to grow. On September 4, 2026, The Seattle Times and Newsday filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of copying hundreds of thousands of articles to train AI systems and requesting the court to destroy models and datasets containing their news content. The complaint cited The Seattle Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Boeing 737 MAX crashes as evidence, claiming that ChatGPT copied 88 consecutive words verbatim after receiving the article's title and link.

Meredith Kopit Levien, CEO of The New York Times, clearly stated at the Status Summit event on September 9: "If they use our work to develop generative AI tools, they need to reach a commercial agreement with us. We will not let anyone off the hook." She emphasized that any agreement must be approved by The New York Times and grant publishers control over how their news content is used, as well as fair and sustainable compensation.

Currently, the lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft by publishers are becoming increasingly widespread. In June 2026, a group representing approximately 400 local newspapers filed a similar lawsuit. Publishers' core demand is that AI companies cannot use copyrighted news reports to build and operate commercial AI products without permission or payment.