A coalition of local newspaper publishers is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright violation, the “systematic and willful theft of hundreds of thousands of copyrighted articles” for use in training ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot.

The publishers “have spent decades—and in some cases over a century—investing in the journalists, editors, and infrastructure required to produce the trusted, original reporting on which their communities depend,” the lawsuit notes. But the AI companies “scraped, copied, and ingested that content” without permission or compensation to build their AI products, which “have generated hundreds of billions of dollars (and counting) in market value” while “not a cent of it has gone to the Publishers whose work made it possible.”

This was all quite deliberate, the suit states, citing OpenAI founder Sam Altman’s testimony before the British House of Lords, conceding that it would be “impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.”

Representing the publishers is new law firm, Platkin LLP, founded this year by former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin.

While there have been similar lawsuits brought by national news organizations and prominent authors, this is the first case involving a coordinated legal effort by local and regional newspapers, whose individual resources are much more meager.