Editorial Perfil sues OpenAI and Microsoft in Argentina over alleged scraping of its journalism
The Argentine publisher says its articles, investigations and interviews were copied without permission or payment, then fed into commercial AI systems that answer readers directly.
Editorial Perfil has filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft in Argentina’s Federal Civil and Commercial Courts, accusing them of scraping and using its journalism without permission or compensation to train and power commercial artificial-intelligence systems. The publisher says the conduct amounted to copyright infringement, unfair competition and abuse of a dominant market position.
According to the Buenos Aires Times, the complaint names OpenAI, L.L.C., Microsoft Corporation and Microsoft de Argentina S.R.L. as defendants. The suit was backed by the law firm Biscardi & Asociados and lawyer Gonzalo Vidal Devoto.
Editorial Perfil said the material taken included articles, investigations and interviews, including content behind its paywall. It alleged that the newsroom material was tracked, downloaded and stored through large-scale scraping, then used as training material for AI models now sold commercially.
The publisher also accused Microsoft products including Bing, Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot and Azure AI of drawing on journalistic content to answer user queries directly. It argued that this reduces the need for readers to visit news sites, cutting into traffic and advertising revenue.
Perfil described the case as the first brought by a Spanish-language media outlet against both OpenAI and Microsoft. It also said OpenAI has signed licensing deals with large international media groups such as Spain’s Prisa Media, but has not compensated outlets for content used in the Argentine and Latin American markets.
The article said OpenAI has publicly argued that journalism plays an important role in its products and that it has agreements with news organisations including the Associated Press, Axel Springer, the Financial Times, Le Monde, Prisa Media, Vox Media, Condé Nast and Reuters. At the time of reporting, neither OpenAI nor Microsoft had issued a public response to the suit.
The case lands amid a wider wave of publisher litigation over generative AI. A coalition of 35 newspaper publishing companies sued OpenAI and Microsoft in Manhattan federal court, saying they represented nearly 400 news outlets across 33 states and alleging the companies scraped their work without permission or compensation to train ChatGPT and Copilot.
That US complaint said the companies had systematically crawled hundreds of news websites, including paywalled material, and copied articles and other original works onto their own servers. It sought statutory and actual damages, restitution of profits and attorney’s fees, and warned that, unless the defendants were held accountable, the AI boom they orchestrated could be a death knell for local journalism.