Argentine media company Editorial Perfil has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft with the nation’s courts, alleging the companies used its journalism without permission or payment to develop and train their artificial intelligence systems, profiting financially in the process.
The suit was filed with Argentina’s Federal Civil and Commercial Courts and names OpenAI, L.L.C., Microsoft Corporation and its local subsidiary, Microsoft de Argentina S.R.L., as defendants, confirmed the media company in a news report.
It accuses the firms of using content produced by its newsroom without authorisation and of profiting financially from that journalistic material, alleging both copyright infringement and unfair competition.
The lawsuit, filed with the backing of law firm Biscardi & Asociados and lawyer Gonzalo Vidal Devoto, is thought to be the first such case brought by a Spanish-language media outlet against the two US tech companies, said Perfil.
It follows a series of similar disputes that have played out in international courts, including The New York Times‘ lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft in the United States and Folha de S.Paulo’s dispute with OpenAI in Brazil.
Editorial Perfil publishes the Perfil newspaper and magazines including Noticias and Caras. It was co-founded in 1976 by Jorge Fontevecchia, who remains its president, and is also the publisher of the Buenos Aires Times.
Allegations
According to the lawsuit, Editorial Perfil’s articles, investigations and interviews – including content behind its paywall, the company alleges – were tracked, downloaded and stored through large-scale scraping, and then used as training material for AI models now sold commercially for billions of US dollars, without compensation to the publisher.
The suit further alleges that Microsoft products including Bing, Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot and Azure AI draw on journalistic content to answer user queries directly, reducing the need for users to visit news sites – a practice Perfil says cuts into traffic, advertising revenue and the broader financial sustainability of professional journalism.
Editorial Perfil also accuses the companies of unfair competition and abuse of a dominant market position, arguing that large tech platforms hold outsized power in the digital ecosystem relative to media companies.
It notes that OpenAI has signed licensing deals with large international media groups, such as Spain’s Prisa Media group, while taking a different approach in the Argentine and Latin American markets, where it has not compensated outlets for the content it uses.
OpenAI has said publicly 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, among others.
Neither OpenAI nor Microsoft has issued a public statement responding to Editorial Perfil’s suit at the time of writing.
– TIMES
