A coalition that owns nearly 400 local US newspapers has sued OpenAI and Microsoft. The publishers call AI training on their reporting a death knell for local journalism. It is the largest copyright case the local press has brought yet.

Local newspapers report the meetings no algorithm attends. The council vote, the school board row, the obituary, the new restaurant downtown. Now the people who own nearly 400 of those papers want a court to decide one thing. What is that reporting worth to an AI company?

On the evening of 24 June, a nationwide coalition of publishers sued OpenAI and Microsoft. The case landed in Manhattan federal court. The 55-page complaint is blunt. It says the two firms copied hundreds of thousands of articles to build ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. They sought no permission and paid nothing.

The case was first detailed by Courthouse News . It is led by Richner Communications, a Long Island publisher. The publishers’ lawyer is Matthew Platkin, who served as New Jersey’s attorney general from 2022 to 2026. He now runs his own firm. The publishers bring three counts of copyright infringement. They want statutory damages, actual damages, a return of profits, and legal fees.

The headline number is the scale: nearly 400 titles in a single filing. The more important shift is which part of the press is now in court. National outlets and best-selling authors sued OpenAI long ago. This is the first time local and regional papers have moved together at this size. These are the thinly funded titles that cover courts and councils.

The named plaintiffs read like a tour of regional America. They include the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the New York Amsterdam News, Newspapers of New England, the Ogden Newspapers chain, and Straus Newspapers. Their mastheads run into the hundreds.

The mechanics matter here. The complaint says OpenAI and Microsoft “systematically and secretly crawled” hundreds of news sites, including pages behind paywalls. It says they copied the articles onto their own servers. Then they stripped out the copyright management information: author bylines, publication names, terms of use, and copyright notices.

That removal sits at the heart of a second claim. The publishers call the stripping “an instrumental part of defendants’ ingestion pipeline,” arguing it severed each article from its owner. They say the cleaned text then trained large language models. Those models “memorized” the work, the suit claims, and reproduced it word for word in answers to users.

Removing that ownership data is itself unlawful, the publishers argue, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Per the New Jersey Globe, the complaint also quotes Sam Altman’s testimony to the British House of Lords. There, the OpenAI chief said it would be “impossible” to train today’s leading models without copyrighted material.

Platkin framed the case around what AI cannot do. “AI systems do not critically evaluate city council and community meetings,” he said. “They don’t investigate local crimes and corruption, publish obituaries, or cover the new restaurant opening downtown. Local reporters do.”

The economics carry the argument. Local papers run on thin budgets and shrinking newsrooms. The complaint calls the unlicensed use a “death knell” for an industry it ranks among the most trusted in America. The claim is not only that copying happened. It is that the harm lands hardest on the outlets least able to absorb it.

A pattern OpenAI keeps meeting in court

OpenAI has been here before. Encyclopaedia Britannica and its Merriam-Webster unit sued the company earlier this year over “massive copying” of their content, and the New York Times case grinds on. The newspapers also join a widening front of rights holders, from authors to actors building tools to keep AI from using their work . Some have chosen the other route, with Getty Images striking a deal rather than fighting.

Microsoft is named alongside OpenAI for a reason. The complaint calls it “an indispensable partner in virtually every aspect of OpenAI’s commercial enterprise.” That relationship began with a $1bn investment in 2019 and reshaped both companies . Neither responded to requests for comment when the suit was filed.

OpenAI has long argued that training on public text counts as fair use, a defence it is running in every one of these cases. The publishers are betting that the secrecy and the stripped bylines weaken it. They want a jury to see crawling behind paywalls as theft, not research.

OpenAI is meanwhile heading toward an $852bn valuation , money raised on the promise that its models can answer almost anything. This case asks a narrower question. If those answers were built on reporting that nobody paid for, who owns the bill? A Manhattan judge, not a product roadmap, will settle it.

With expertise in digital marketing, product management, and branding & identity, Ana Maria Constantin develops strategies that resonate (show all) With expertise in digital marketing, product management, and branding & identity, Ana Maria Constantin develops strategies that resonate with our target audience in the software/SaaS industry. Collaboration and teamwork are paramount to her, as she loves empowering her colleagues to achieve outstanding results and unlock their full potential.