Eight U.S. newspaper publishers filed suit against Microsoft and OpenAI in a New York federal court on Tuesday, claiming the technology companies reuse their articles without permission in generative artificial intelligence products and incorrectly attribute inaccurate information to them.

The group of eight newspaper publishers takes issue with ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot assistant — available in the Windows operating system, the Bing search engine, and other products the software maker produces. ChatGPT and Copilot have been “purloining millions of the publishers’ copyrighted articles without permission and without payment,” according to the complaint, which had been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The newspaper publishers in the lawsuit operate the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, the Sun Sentinel in Florida, The Mercury News in California, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register in California and the Pioneer Press of Minnesota.

The newspaper publishers said in the lawsuit that OpenAI has drawn on data sets containing text from their newspapers to train its GPT-2 and GPT-3 large language models, which can spit out text in response to a few words of human input.

“The current GPT-4 LLM will output near-verbatim copies of significant portions of the publishers’ works when prompted to do so,” the complaint said, showing several examples of ChatGPT and the Copilot allegedly doing so.

The publishers said Microsoft copies information from their newspapers for the Bing search index, which helps inform answers in the Copilot. But such output doesn’t always provide links to newspaper websites, where they can view ads alongside articles or pay for subscriptions.

Microsoft and OpenAI representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment from CNBC.

The legal challenge comes four months after The New York Times sued OpenAI over copyright infringement in the ChatGPT chatbot that the startup released in late 2022. OpenAI said in a January blog post that the case is without merit, adding it wants to support “a healthy news ecosystem.” That same month, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said the startup wanted to pay The New York Times and was surprised to learn about the lawsuit.

In recent months, OpenAI has signed deals with a handful of media companies, including Axel Springer and the Financial Times, enabling the Microsoft-backed startup to draw on the publishers’ content to improve AI models.

Google, which has its own general-purpose chatbot for responding to user queries, said in February that it had reached an agreement with Reddit that includes the right to train AI models on the platform’s content.

The New York Times case also touched on the matter of OpenAI models regurgitating information from its articles. In its blog post, OpenAI characterized such behavior as “a rare failure of the learning process that we are continually making progress on.”

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect the correct day the lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI was filed.

WATCH: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: The U.S. needs an AI policy

Meta on Tuesday was hit by the European Commission — the executive body of the European Union — with a major investigation into its compliance with the EU’s strict internet content rules.

The Commission said it is investigating Meta over concerns the company hasn’t done enough to ensure effective combatting of disinformation ahead of upcoming European Parliament elections.

The European Parliament elections are due to take place on June 6-9.

In the Commission’s statement Tuesday, it said it suspects Meta is incompliant with DSA (Digital Services Act) obligations regarding tackling deceptive advertisements, disinformation campaigns, and coordinated inauthentic behavior in the EU.

The Commission also said Meta may have infringed the DSA by demoting political content in the recommendation systems of Instagram and Facebook, which it said may have violated transparency requirements.

“We have a well-established process for identifying and mitigating risks on our platforms,” a Meta spokesperson told CNBC via email.

“We look forward to continuing our cooperation with the European Commission and providing them with further details of this work.”

The bloc also took issue with the lack of availability of an effective third-party, real-time civil discourse and election-monitoring tool ahead of upcoming elections to the European Parliament, plus other votes in various individual member states.

It said Meta is in the process of depreciating its CrowdTangle tool, which is a public insights tool enabling real-time election monitoring by researchers, journalists, and civil society through visual dashboards.

For its part, Meta maintains that CrowdTangle is an inefficient election monitoring tool as it lacks enough publicly available data. The company is building new tools on its systems to provide access to more comprehensive data from its platforms.

Influential proxy advisory firm ISS recommended on Tuesday that Norfolk Southern shareholders support five of activist Ancora’s seven board nominees, withholding an endorsement from CEO pick Jim Barber but describing him as a “credible director and CEO candidate nonetheless.”

ISS’ endorsement, in a report viewed by CNBC, comes one day after Glass Lewis endorsed most of activist investor’s slate of nominees and days after two unions came out in support of Ancora’s proposed management team.

The proxy advisor recommended shareholders support CEO Alan Shaw’s reelection to the board over Barber, but in a rebuke of NSC’s existing governance, it said shareholders should not support current board chair Amy Miles.

Ancora is seeking to oust both current CEO Shaw and newly appointed COO John Orr. The activist holds Shaw accountable for NSC’s historic underperformance relative to peers, and for a disastrous derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, just a few months into his tenure.

Glass Lewis, the other influential proxy advisory firm, said shareholders should support Barber over Shaw in its recommendation Monday. While neither endorsement suggests giving Ancora full control of the board, both provide the dissident with a clear mandate to implement change.

Investors, especially passive index-fund giants like Vanguard and BlackRock, pay close attention to proxy advisors’ recommendations when deciding how to vote their millions of shares. The top three shareholders at Norfolk Southern control more than 16% of shares outstanding.

ISS said in its report that it was clear “that the dissident has presented a balanced slate consisting of qualified nominees, and has generally targeted the appropriate management nominees.”

ISS recommends shareholders support Ancora nominees William Clyburn, Sameh Fahmy, Gilbert Lamphere, Allison Landry and John Kasich.

The proxy advisor said that Norfolk Southern’s governance problems were “most evident” in the board’s failure to communicate with investors and prioritize their “best interests.”

“As board chair, Amy Miles arguably bears the most responsibility for this state of affairs,” ISS’ report read.

Norfolk Southern has taken steps to address investor concerns, including appointing Orr as COO and adding two new directors, former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp and former Delta CEO Richard Anderson. ISS endorsed Anderson’s election but said shareholders should not support Heitkamp.

“There is no evidence suggesting that Heitkamp is in any way unfit to serve, but dissident nominee John Kasich has comparable regulatory and administrative experience,” the ISS report said, mentioning the latter’s “proven ability” to foster compromise.

WATCH: CNBC’s full interview with NSC CEO Shaw on activist campaign