Publishers Want AI Models Destroyed as Microsoft Says Copilot Rarely Copies Them

Publishers Want AI Models Destroyed as Microsoft Says Copilot Rarely Copies Them
The fight over generative AI and journalism has moved from a broad industry warning to a more pointed demand: not merely damages, but the destruction of systems allegedly trained on unlicensed reporting.

The Seattle Times and Newsday became the latest publishers to sue OpenAI, alleging the company used their journalism as AI training material without permission and can reproduce passages of their work when prompted. They also named Microsoft, whose Copilot product is built on OpenAI technology. The outlets are seeking the destruction of copies of their work, training datasets and AI models that incorporate it.

Their case follows lawsuits from The New York Times, Ziff Davis, Merriam-Webster and Encyclopedia Britannica, as well as a separate action by nearly 400 local newspapers. The publishers’ central argument is economic: chatbots can answer readers’ questions without sending them to the original reporting, threatening subscriptions and traffic.

Microsoft’s latest legal filing frames the same technology very differently. After providing 8.2 million Copilot chat logs for analysis in the publishers’ litigation, the company said 59,545 conversations contained at least 16 words in common with news material used to ground the model. It said an expert found only 51 examples of “substantial overlap” involving work from the Center for Investigative Reporting; in the authors’ case, only 24 responses had at least 30 matching words.

For Microsoft, those figures support a fair-use defense: the systems may rely on copyrighted material, but serve a different purpose from the underlying articles or books. Occasional reproduction, it argues, “hardly undermines the transformative purpose of LLM training.”

The Times rejects that premise. Its lead counsel, Ian Crosby, said discovery shows Microsoft and OpenAI “stole from The New York Times to make commercial products that substitute for its journalism.” Microsoft has asked for summary judgment; if it fails, the dispute heads deeper into court.

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