Newspapers Want OpenAI's Models Destroyed

Two US regional newspapers have filed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, according to The Verge. The Seattle Times and Newsday allege their published journalism was used to train AI models without permission, and that ChatGPT and Copilot now reproduce passages from their reporting when users ask questions — cutting readers off from visiting the original articles.

The papers are not just seeking damages. They want any copies of their work deleted, along with the training datasets and the AI models built from them. That is an unusually aggressive remedy, and if a court ever granted it, the implications for the AI industry would be significant.

This is not a one-off. The same two companies face similar claims from The New York Times, Ziff Davis, Merriam-Webster, and Encyclopedia Britannica. The Seattle Times and Newsday also join nearly 400 local newspapers that filed a related suit recently.

The publishers' core argument is economic, not just legal: when a chatbot answers a question by summarising their reporting, users have no reason to click through to the original article. That kills subscription revenue and advertising. OpenAI and Microsoft have not yet responded publicly to this filing.

The outcome is genuinely uncertain. Courts have not yet settled whether training an AI model on published text constitutes copyright infringement. Watch for any early rulings on whether the requested destruction of models is a remedy courts will even consider.

Premiere Pro is Adobe's professional video editing software, used by editors in broadcast, film, and online production. Adobe has now added a Generative Media panel that lets editors generate video clips, music, sound effects, and soundscapes without leaving the timeline, according to The Verge.

The change is about access, not entirely new capability. Editors highlight an empty gap on the timeline and generate context-aware content directly in place. They can pick from multiple underlying models, including Adobe Firefly, Google Veo, Runway, Luma, and Kling, depending on which style fits the project.

New audio tools in beta can separate overlapping speakers, automatically lower music volume when someone is talking, and adjust dialogue and background sound independently. After Effects is also getting a plain-language AI assistant in beta.

This is aimed squarely at working editors, not hobbyists. Premiere is a paid subscription product. There is no free tier for these features.

Honest read: Worth watching if you edit video professionally — cutting between external AI tools and your timeline is genuinely painful, and this solves a real problem. Whether the generated output is good enough to use in real projects depends on testing Adobe has not yet made independently available.

What it is: A research paper studying how to make AI safety filters refuse only the genuinely harmful slice of a topic, rather than blocking the whole subject.

What's new: Most safety systems work at the topic level — flag "politics" or "weapons" and block everything in that category. This paper argues that is too blunt and too leaky at the same time. A civics tutor needs to answer factual election questions but refuse requests to write targeted political manipulation. A topic-level filter cannot express that distinction.

How it works: The researchers define a narrow target: within political prompts, only refuse requests for manipulation or persuasion, while continuing to answer factual questions. They train the model using self-distillation (where the model generates its own training examples of correct refusals) but fix a specific flaw in that pipeline. Standard single-attempt generation silently drops prompts where no good refusal example is produced — in their tests, that was nearly 20% of harmful prompts. Their fix retries those failed cases with progressively stronger steering, bringing failures down from 19.88% to 0.20%. The result is a model that can hold a sharper line between "answer this" and "refuse this" within the same topic.

What it can't do: The paper tests only on political persuasion as its harmful category. How well this approach transfers to other topics — medical advice, weapons, financial fraud — is untested. The authors acknowledge the boundary between harmful and benign prompts will vary by deployment context, and that defining it correctly is its own unsolved problem.

Who should care: Teams building AI products for regulated or sensitive industries where blanket topic refusals create as many problems as they solve.

Read it: Hugging Face blog

AlphaGenome Atlas is a free research tool from Google DeepMind that maps the predicted effect of every possible single-letter change in the human genome — roughly 9 billion variants — in one searchable database. It is available today through a browser-based portal, no coding required.

The tool is built on AlphaGenome, an AI model trained to predict how genetic changes affect biological processes like gene regulation. The Atlas precomputes those predictions at scale so researchers can look up any variant without running the model themselves. A companion score, the AVI (AlphaGenome Variant Impact) score, condenses the predictions into a single number to help rank variants quickly.

Early collaborators have already used it to find key variants in unsolved rare disease cases. The dataset is 1 petabyte — too large to download whole — but the web portal makes it accessible to researchers without computational infrastructure.

You can access it today at deepmind.google/blog/alphagenome-atlas.

Worth knowing: This is a research tool for scientists working in genomics and molecular biology — it requires domain knowledge to interpret results. General readers will find the portal interesting, but the outputs are not designed to be self-explanatory.

The European Commission is hosting the Apply AI Summit on 17 November 2026 in Brussels, marking one year since the EU's Apply AI Strategy was adopted. The event will bring together roughly 900 in-person attendees and up to 2,500 online participants to discuss AI adoption in healthcare, mobility, public administration, and other sectors. Sessions will cover the EU AI Act, AI safety, and a startup award for homegrown European AI products. Registration closes 13 November. For EU-based businesses, the sessions on the AI Act and innovation are the ones most likely to affect how you operate. Full details at digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu.