A group of 35 local and regional publishers representing nearly 400 newspapers has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the companies copied their journalism without permission to develop products including ChatGPT and Copilot.

The complaint was filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on June 24.

The publishers allege that OpenAI and Microsoft systematically crawled their websites, copied articles and other protected works onto company servers and used the material to train large language models.

The lawsuit also claims the companies removed copyright information including author names, publication titles and ownership notices before reproducing material through AI generated responses.

Some of the disputed content was protected by paywalls, according to the complaint.

The publishers argue that ChatGPT and Copilot reduce traffic, subscriptions and advertising revenue by allowing users to obtain information without visiting the original news websites.

They warned that uncompensated AI training could further weaken local journalism, which already operates under significant financial pressure.

The case includes claims of direct copyright infringement, vicarious infringement and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The publishers are seeking statutory and compensatory damages, the return of profits linked to the alleged infringement and an injunction requiring the companies to remove registered works from GPT models and training sets.

OpenAI rejected the allegations, saying its models are trained on publicly available data and that the process is protected by fair use.

Microsoft had not publicly responded to the lawsuit at the time of publication.

The case adds nearly 400 local newspapers to the expanding copyright battle between publishers and AI developers over whether publicly accessible material can be used for model training without payment or permission.