With Lawsuits and New Laws, News Publishers Gain Leverage Against AI Developers

“The publishers’ journalism was essential to the defendants’ explosive growth, and unless Defendants are held accountable for stealing, stripping and misusing the publishers’ content, the AI boom Defendants orchestrated and benefit from will be a death knell for local journalism — which remains the most trusted news sources in America,” the publishers said in their 55-page complaint filed in federal district court in New York.

The group is represented by Matthew J. Platkin, who served as the attorney general of New Jersey from 2022 to 2026.

OpenAI and Microsoft are also the targets of the earliest news publisher lawsuit, filed by the New York Times in 2023. This week, the Times filed an amended complaint in the same New York federal district court accusing Microsoft of encouraging OpenAI to train its A.I. systems using copyrighted articles from The Times and of providing services designed to help with this training.

“As we have long alleged, Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal our copyrighted works,” Graham James, a Times spokesman, said in a statement. “Beyond amending that claim and streamlining the case to its most potent arguments, our core claims remain the same from the day we filed this lawsuit.”

The lawsuit filed by the group of publishers echoes that allegation. They claim OpenAI and Microsoft “systematically and secretly crawled” hundreds of news websites, including content behind paywalls and other terms of service restrictions, and describe Microsoft as “an indispensable partner in virtually every aspect of OpenAI’s commercial enterprise.”

Related: House Republican Introduces Bill Requiring AI Firms to Report Serious Safety Incidents

The latest legal filings come as publishers are gaining new technical tools and strategies to control access to their content by bots and impose conditions on its use. Earlier this month, a group of British publishers calling themselves SPUR, the Standards for Publishers’ Usage Rights, coalition, unveiled what it describes as a “common language” for tracking the use of content by AI systems. It also took the wraps off a draft “signal format for content usage reporting.”

“Tracking how AI systems use content creates benefits for everyone involved. A common standard means AI systems and their users benefit from better, more relevant outputs,” Financial Times chief executive Jon Slade, who is leading the effort, said in the press release. “For content creators, seeing how and where their work brings value within the AI environment helps them understand where to focus energy and resources for that audience.”

In March, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) announced the launch of the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Interchange (“A-triple-I”) to facilitate global dialog on “the technical and operational aspects of the intellectual property system in the context of artificial intelligence.”

News publishers are also gaining support for controlling access to their content from lawmakers. In early June, the New York State legislature passed the New York Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act barring the use of web crawlers that hide their identity to evade news publishers’ blacklists of prohibited bots.

Right now, news websites are drowning in bot traffic. Bad bots are disguising their identities to overload publisher servers and access the quality content on our sites, hurting our ability to serve readers, News|Media Alliance CEO Danielle Coffey said in a statement. “By requiring transparency and accountability for bad actors, the New York Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act gives publishers the tools they need to defend themselves and continue providing quality and critical information.”

By ramping up their litigation strategies, news publishers are hoping to keep the pressure on AI companies on all fronts.