Two opposite moves inside ten days, and Microsoft is on both sides of them. On July 3, 2026, Microsoft and Nine Entertainment announced an Australian-first agreement: Copilot may reference the full text of four Nine mastheads, the Australian Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Brisbane Times, past the paywall, with attribution and links back to the source. One-year term. Financial terms undisclosed. It is described as the first deal of its kind in the Asia Pacific region. Nine days earlier, on June 24, 2026, nearly 400 US local newspapers filed a federal class action against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that their copyrighted reporting was used for training with the copyright-management information stripped out. That case runs under the Copyright Act and the DMCA, filed by the firm of former New Jersey attorney general Matthew Platkin. The complaint quotes Sam Altman telling the UK House of Lords that it would be "impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials." Same company. Licensor in Sydney, co-defendant in the United States.
Credibility: HIGH. The Nine deal is confirmed on Microsoft's own newsroom; the lawsuit is corroborated by Bloomberg Law and Courthouse News from the filed complaint. Press Gazette, the aggregating tracker, is a UK press-industry outlet and leans pro-publisher; the underlying primary artifacts are independent of that bias.
- July 3, 2026: Nine and Microsoft sign a Copilot licensing deal covering four Nine mastheads, described as first-of-its-kind in Asia Pacific. One-year term, financial terms undisclosed.
- June 24, 2026: roughly 400 local newspapers file a federal class action against OpenAI and Microsoft under the Copyright Act and the DMCA, through the firm of former New Jersey attorney general Matthew Platkin.
- The complaint cites Sam Altman's UK House of Lords testimony that it would be "impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials".
- Microsoft appears on both sides: licensor in Australia, co-defendant in the US suit.
Stay ahead of AI search
The changes that move your rankings and AI citations — and the exact move to make — before they cost you. Free, three times a week.
For teams working on AI visibility, this is an arc to watch rather than a setting to change this week. But look at the shape of it. Where a market has a few large publishers, Microsoft negotiates: Australian news is concentrated enough that four mastheads and one signature buy Copilot the whole paywall. Where a market has hundreds of small papers and no single counterparty to call, the publishers go to a federal judge, because that is the only table available to them. Contract or court, what reaches the person reading an AI answer is the same sorting: a licensed publisher gets named and linked, and an unlicensed one gets whatever the courts leave standing.
So the question splits depending on who your client is. If they publish, you need to know which side of the licence line they sit on, and whether they are a potential member of the June 24 class. If they depend on being cited in AI answers, the question is whether the sources that carry them are quietly becoming pay-to-be-cited. That is a live risk worth naming, and it is not a reason to write off AI-visibility tracking. The tracker is what shows you the substitution when it happens, which domains Copilot starts citing after July 3 and which ones stop appearing.
- Assess licensing exposure for every publisher client this month: inside a Copilot or OpenAI licence, unlicensed, or a potential class member in the June 24 suit. Write the answer down, because it changes what you tell them about AI referral traffic.
- For brands that depend on AI citations, list the sources currently carrying them in Copilot answers and mark which now sit under an exclusive AI licence. Licensed grounding can crowd out unlicensed domains in the answer.
- Track over the next 30 days whether other AI engines move to licensed-source grounding the way Copilot did with Nine, and note it against this row.
Press Gazette: "Who's suing AI and who's signing" (publisher AI deals & lawsuits tracker) — https://pressgazette.co.uk/platforms/news-publisher-ai-deals-lawsuits-openai-google/
Microsoft Source Asia: "Nine and Microsoft announce Australian-first AI agreement for news media content", July 3, 2026 — https://news.microsoft.com/source/asia/2026/07/03/nine-microsoft-copilot-agreement/
Bloomberg Law: "OpenAI, Microsoft Sued by Publishers for Scraping Articles" — https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/publishers-sue-microsoft-openai-over-unauthorized-content-use
Courthouse News Service: "Newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft for mass copyright infringement" — https://www.courthousenews.com/newspapers-sue-openai-microsoft-for-mass-copyright-infringement/