A group of publishers, representing nearly 400 newspapers, has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, accusing them of copyright infringement. The complaint alleges that the two companies unlawfully used the publishers' content to develop and train AI chatbots like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT without consent or compensation. According to the complaint, "Defendants systematically and secretly crawled the Publishers’ websites—including content behind paywalls and other access restrictions—and copied the Publishers’ articles, stories, and other original works onto their own servers without authorization." In court proceedings, Microsoft and OpenAI have consistently argued that copyright law does not explicitly prohibit the use of online content to train AI models. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has openly acknowledged that building tools like ChatGPT would be virtually impossible without relying on copyrighted material.