Source: Reuters

Reuters reports that a veteran journalist from the New York Times has initiated a significant legal action against major tech companies, including Google, OpenAI, and xAI. The lawsuit, filed on December 22, 2025, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Manhattan, alleges that these corporations unlawfully utilized her copyrighted reporting to train their generative artificial intelligence models. The plaintiff contends that these companies "pillaged" decades of professional journalism without providing any compensation or obtaining necessary licenses, effectively building profitable products on the back of stolen intellectual property.

The legal complaint emphasizes that the outputs of these AI chatbots often serve as a direct market substitute for the original news articles. By providing detailed summaries and answering specific queries based on the reporter's work, the chatbots allegedly discourage readers from visiting the primary news sources, thereby undermining the economic model of professional journalism. The reporter argues that this practice does not fall under the "fair use" doctrine, as the use is neither transformative nor non-competing, but rather a wholesale appropriation of creative and investigative effort for commercial gain.

This case adds to a growing wave of litigation targeting the data-scraping practices of the AI industry. Unlike previous class-action suits, this individual claim highlights the specific harm caused to individual creators whose livelihood depends on the enforcement of copyright protections. The outcome of this trial in Manhattan is expected to set a critical precedent regarding whether AI developers must pay for the high-quality data they use to power their systems. Tech companies maintain that their processes are legal, but media professionals argue that without intervention, the AI revolution could permanently cripple the news industry.