Raw Story, AlterNet, and, in a separate case, The Intercept sue OpenAI in a NY federal court for copyright infringement; The Intercept is also suing Microsoft
Context & Ripple Effects
These filings extend the media-industry challenge that began with The New York Times’ copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, bringing smaller digital publishers into the same New York federal-court arena.
The cases matter because they test distinct alleged harms around AI use of news content. Later rulings split their paths: Raw Story and AlterNet’s case was dismissed for insufficiently shown harm, for now, while The Intercept retained a narrower DMCA-related claim against OpenAI.
First-order effects
- OpenAI must defend additional copyright claims from Raw Story, AlterNet, and The Intercept; Microsoft is separately named in The Intercept’s case.
- The publishers turn alleged use of their reporting into a federal-court dispute, seeking legal accountability rather than relying on voluntary AI-content arrangements.
Second-order effects
- The filings add to the litigation pressure on AI companies already facing the Times case, while giving other publishers a concrete route to test claims over training and attribution; Alden-owned newspapers later filed a similar suit.
- The Intercept’s separate case puts Microsoft’s exposure alongside OpenAI’s under scrutiny, even though later proceedings dismissed the claims against Microsoft.
Third-order effects
- If courts recognize actionable harm or DMCA violations in these disputes, AI developers and news publishers may have to place greater weight on provenance, attribution, and content-licensing terms.
- The diverging later outcomes suggest that broad training-based claims and narrower metadata or attribution claims may develop on different legal tracks, leaving the boundaries unsettled.
The trend: News publishers are increasingly using litigation to define the terms on which generative-AI systems can ingest, reproduce, and attribute journalism.