Coalition of ~400 local US newspapers sues OpenAI and Microsoft
A coalition of roughly 400 local and regional US newspapers filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft on 24 June 2026, alleging systematic copyright infringement and DMCA violations from LLM training-data scraping. It is the largest publisher-coalition action to date targeting AI training data, exceeding the New York Times’ 2023 filing in scope and the late-May 2026 CNN-vs-Perplexity action in publisher count. The plaintiffs allege both unauthorised reproduction of copyrighted articles and stripping of copyright-management information – the latter a separate statutory violation under the DMCA carrying its own damages route.
The filing follows Penske Media’s antitrust suit against Google’s AI Overviews earlier in 2026 and CNN’s late-May copyright filing against Perplexity. Read together, the three cases describe a litigation wave that is broadening: small and large publishers, copyright and antitrust grounds, training-data scraping and search-referral substitution all in play simultaneously.
Why this matters for remote-work publishers in Europe: Two corridors are visibly opening, and small publishers will have to choose one. The litigation corridor is now being scoped by US plaintiffs across publisher size and legal theory, and European publishers retain rights under EU directives that the US suits do not directly invoke. The licensing corridor is being scoped by Perplexity’s Publishers Program (now past 2,400 partners on an 80/20 revenue split), OpenAI’s bilateral deals with major outlets, and Anthropic’s selective partnerships. A niche European remote-work publisher in 2026-27 is not large enough to litigate independently, but is large enough to make a corridor choice that affects content strategy: opting in to AI visibility through licensing partnerships, opting out via robots.txt and Cloudflare-style default blocks, or selectively allowing crawl-and-cite under terms.
The W27 filing is a useful concrete trigger for revisiting that choice. The legal-corridor data point: large coalitions are now litigating. The licensing-corridor data point: Perplexity’s program continues to scale. Neither is a settled answer, but the question is moving from “should I have a position” to “what is my position.”
For background on how AI search developments are reshaping publisher economics in Europe, see our AI Overviews publisher traffic decline accelerates piece and our Cloudflare default AI bot block analysis. For the licensing-corridor side, see our OpenAI Getty ChatGPT Search display partnership coverage.