The Shoestring, other news publishers sue OpenAI and Microsoft

The Shoestring and other news publishers are suing OpenAI and Microsoft for uncompensated use of published material to build products like ChatGPT.

Filed on Wednesday in New York’s Southern District, the suit seeks damages for the use of our journalism to build up some of the largest companies in the world.

“Without permission and without any compensation to the Publishers, Defendants scraped, copied, and ingested that content to build and commercialize their generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) products, including ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot,” the suit reads. “Those products have generated hundreds of billions of dollars (and counting) in market value for Defendants. Not a cent of it has gone to the Publishers whose work made it possible.”

This suit follows two similar cases currently before the Southern District — one filed by The New York Times and another brought by a group of owners of hundreds of local newspapers across the country, including the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Greenfield Recorder. The Shoestring and our co-plaintiffs — mostly smaller, independent news publishers — are represented by Platkin LLP, a firm founded by former New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin, which is also representing the group of local newspaper publishers.

The New York Times case, which has already survived a motion to dismiss, has caught the attention of the Trump administration, whose Justice Department filed a brief in support of OpenAI and Microsoft.

“The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally,” the brief reads, per The Guardian. “As such, it is critical for the United States to ‘retain global leadership in artificial intelligence.'”

The lawsuits make the case that OpenAI and Microsoft used a dataset that essentially amounts to a “copy of the internet” to train the products that catapulted the former company to an $852 billion valuation in 2026. That dataset included over 68,000 tokens of text — about the length of a short novel — from The Shoestring. For other publishers, that figure climbs into the hundreds of thousands, and in some cases even millions of tokens worth of material protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

In other words, these companies stole from us, and the irony is not lost on us that such a theft takes place when local journalism is in crisis.

The truth is that AI companies are only the latest players among the cohort who have capitalized on the desire of the public to be informed members of their communities. In the mid-2010s, for example, after news publications’ audiences had become accustomed to finding information from preferred and trusted local news outlets on platforms like Google and Facebook, those companies began boosting sponsored and addictive content via increasingly complex algorithms, effectively capturing and stealing the audiences of news publishers to bolster their own user bases.

Then came so-called artificial intelligence. The large language models of the 2020s AI boom are effectively probability machines, working like much more powerful versions of the predictive text feature on a smartphone keyboard by guessing what words make sense as a reply to a prompt. But to make a product like ChatGPT that was actually going to be good enough at this to be appealing to people, companies like OpenAI and Microsoft had to obtain vast quantities of training data, and they largely did so without compensating rights holders.

Though news publications are hardly the only victims here, the work we produce as a public service has once again been monetized by those who have no investment in our communities’ access to quality information. Indeed, they are actively eroding that access by releasing chatbots to the world that are under no obligation to produce truthful or accurate outputs.

In just over a month, we’ll once again ask our readers to help us keep The Shoestring afloat for another year. We rely on our communities to spare whatever money they can to support a common goal: keeping the information that people need to live in a democracy freely accessible to all. When we launch that fund drive, we’ll be thinking about how, in a way, we’ve all already paid our dues — in clicks, in eyeballs, and in internet searches that are now AI-assisted whether we like it or not. The value generated by those actions has gone towards some of the wealthiest corporations that have ever existed.

With this lawsuit, we intend to get some of it back.