USA Today Co. sues OpenAI for more than $250M over training on articles from 19 newspapers
Confirmed
The takeaway
On Oct 8, 2026 USA TODAY Co. and affiliated newspapers sued OpenAI in federal court in New York, alleging that it trained GPT models on hundreds of thousands of their articles without permission and that ChatGPT outputs substitute for their journalism.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 8 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra161 days after its cutoff
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None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 100 days before it.
Key facts
- Filed Oct 8, 2026 in New York federal court (S.D.N.Y.) by USA TODAY Co., Inc. and affiliates; damages sought: more than $250M (Forbes, Reuters, Unite.AI)
- Publications: 19, including USA Today, The Tennessean, the Detroit Free Press and The Arizona Republic
- Counts: direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, and removal of copyright management information under DMCA §1202. OpenAI is the only defendant (Microsoft is not named)
- Allegation: ‘OpenAI’s internal communications confirm that it deliberately targeted news content and knew its models were built to reproduce it’; the complaint points to OpenAI’s licensing deals with AP, Axel Springer, The Atlantic and Vox Media as proof it knows a license is required
- A statement of relatedness asks the court to treat it as related to the consolidated OpenAI copyright litigation (the MDL including NYT v. OpenAI), which is already at summary judgment; ChatGPT Is Eating the World counts 29 copyright suits against OpenAI in the US
What happened
USA Today’s publisher joined the long list of news organizations suing OpenAI over training data. Its complaint follows the pattern of earlier publisher suits but seeks to ride along with the consolidated case in New York, where the New York Times and others are already at the summary-judgment stage.
Why it matters
It adds one of the largest US local-news chains to the publisher litigation against OpenAI shortly after an appeals court held that training on copyrighted material was not fair use in Thomson Reuters v. Ross, raising the stakes for the pending summary-judgment ruling.
Note: the complaint itself was not read; details come from Reuters (via TradingView), Unite.AI and ChatGPT Is Eating the World.
Sources
5 sources from 5 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
5 sources: 4 press, 1 reaction
Press
- Reuters (via TradingView): USA Today sues OpenAI for copyright infringement over AI trainingtradingview.com, press
- The Verge: USA Today becomes the latest publisher to sue OpenAItheverge.com, press
- Forbes: USA Today sues OpenAI for over $250 million, alleging willful copyright infringementforbes.com, press
- Unite.AI: USA TODAY sues OpenAI over copyrighted news content in AI trainingunite.ai, press
Reactions
- ChatGPT Is Eating the World: USA Today sues OpenAI in yet another tag-along copyright suit (complaint PDF)chatgptiseatingtheworld.com, discussion
Changes
- Filed