Legal actionSeverity N: legal or test findingAlleged: one party's claim

Nearly 400 local newspapers, including Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, sued OpenAI and Microsoft over ChatGPT and Copilot training

On June 24, 2026, a coalition of 34 newspaper companies representing nearly 400 local publications across 33 states sued OpenAI and Microsoft in federal court in New York. The complaint alleges the companies scraped publisher websites, copied articles without permission, stripped copyright management information and used the material to train ChatGPT and Copilot. The claims rest on the Copyright Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the newspapers seek statutory damages and an injunction forcing removal of their work from the models and training data. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and its parent WEHCO are named plaintiffs.

What the AI did

ChatGPT and Copilot are alleged to have been trained on newspaper articles that OpenAI and Microsoft copied from publisher websites without permission, with copyright information removed. The lawsuit asks for the articles to be taken out of the models and their training data.

First reported June 24, 2026 · Added to the register October 11, 2026 · 1 source

Newspaper companies suing: 34 newspaper companies (nearly 400 local publications)
Developer: OpenAI, Microsoft
Model: Copilot, ChatGPT
Affected: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and WEHCO
Country: United States (New York)
When it happened: June 24, 2026
First reported: June 24, 2026

Show the source wording

What this means for you

Could this affect you?

Possibly

If you build or use AI models trained on content copied from the web. Besides OpenAI and Microsoft, businesses that build or use AI models trained on content copied from websites may face similar copyright claims and demands to remove material.

What to check

Review where the training data for AI models you build or buy came from, and whether it was licensed.
Check whether your AI vendors promise to cover your legal costs if their models face copyright claims.
If you publish online, review your robots.txt file, which tells automated tools which pages they may copy.
If you publish online, keep dated records of the work you publish.

Areas of your AI programme this touches

Third-party and vendor AI

Timeline

June 24, 2026Happened
June 24, 2026First reported

Every fact and its source (3)

Lawsuit filed2026-06-24
“On June 24, 2026, a coalition of 34 newspaper companies”^[1]
Relief soughtStatutory damages and injunction to remove work from models
“seeking statutory damages along with an injunction that would force the removal of their work from the underlying models and training data”^[1]
Legal basisCopyright Act and DMCA
“The legal claims rest on the federal Copyright Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act”^[1]

Sources

Arkansas's own Democrat-Gazette is among nearly 400 local newspapers now suing OpenAI and Microsoft over claims their articles were scraped without permission to train ChatGPT and Copilot, and the case could set the terms for whether smaller blogs and digital publishers ever get compensated when their content trains someone else's AI.
blogherald.com · October 6, 2026

How this record is classified. Severity N: a legal action or test finding, not a harm. Evidence: Alleged, meaning one party's claim.

The facts in At a glance and in Every fact and its source are quoted from the sources listed. The summary, What the AI did and What this means for you are written from those sources and checked against them automatically before publication. Records reflect what has been disclosed, not everything that has happened. Incidents are found through news feeds and the GDELT Project.