Eight newspapers sued Microsoft and OpenAI on Tuesday, claiming the technology giants illegally harvested millions of copyrighted articles to create their cutting-edge “generative” artificial intelligence products including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot.

While the newspapers’ publishers have spent billions of dollars to send “real people to real places to report on real events in the real world,” the two tech firms are “purloining” the papers’ reporting without compensation “to create products that provide news and information plagiarized and stolen,” according to the lawsuit in federal court.

“We can’t allow OpenAI and Microsoft to expand the Big Tech playbook of stealing our work to build their own businesses at our expense,” said Frank Pine, executive editor of MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing, which own seven of the newspapers. “The misappropriation of news content by OpenAI and Microsoft undermines the business model for news. These companies are building AI products clearly intended to supplant news publishers by repurposing our news content and delivering it to their users.”

The lawsuit was filed Tuesday morning in the Southern District of New York on behalf of the MediaNews Group-owned San Jose Mercury News, Denver Post, Orange County Register and St. Paul Pioneer-Press; Tribune Publishing’s Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel; and the New York Daily News.

Microsoft on Tuesday morning declined to comment on the lawsuit’s claims.

OpenAI said Tuesday morning it takes “great care” in its products and design process to support news companies. “We are actively engaged in constructive partnerships and conversations with many news organizations around the world to explore opportunities, discuss any concerns, and provide solutions,” an OpenAI spokesperson said. “We see immense potential for AI tools like ChatGPT to deepen publishers’ relationships with readers and enhance the news experience.”

Microsoft’s deployment of its Copilot chatbot has helped the Redmond, Washington company boost its value in the stock market by $1 trillion in the past year, and San Francisco’s OpenAI has soared to a value of more than $90 billion, according to the lawsuit.

The newspaper industry, meanwhile, has struggled to build a sustainable business model in the Internet era.

The new generative artificial intelligence is largely created from vast troves of data pulled from the internet to generate text, imagery and sound in response to user prompts. The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 sparked a massive surge in generative AI investment by companies large and small, building and selling products that could answer questions, write essays, produce photo, video and audio simulations, create computer code, and make art and music.

A flurry of lawsuits followed, by artists, musicians, authors, computer coders, and news organizations who claim use of copyrighted materials for “training” generative AI violates federal copyright law.

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