USA Today and local newspapers sue OpenAI over AI training

USA Today Co. and affiliated entities sued OpenAI in federal court on October 8, alleging the company copied hundreds of thousands of articles and other materials without permission to train and operate GPT models. The plaintiffs seek more than $250 million in damages and a court order blocking the alleged infringement.

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York under case number 1:26-cv-08892. It covers material from 19 publications: USA TODAY, The Tennessean, Indy Star, The Bergen Record, The Enquirer, Asbury Park Press, Democrat & Chronicle, The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Naples Daily News, The Oklahoman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Columbus Dispatch, The Arizona Republic, The Courier-Journal, The Des Moines Register, Detroit Free Press, The Detroit News, The Palm Beach Post and Star News.

The publishers allege OpenAI used their work both to build models and to produce answers that reproduce or repackage their journalism. They claim their domains account for more than 160,000 entries in the GPT-2 WebText dataset and more than 122 million tokens in C4, a filtered English-language subset of a 2019 Common Crawl snapshot. Those figures and the copying claims have not been adjudicated or independently tested.

The complaint also alleges OpenAI removed copyright-management information, including author names, article titles, copyright notices and terms of use, while preparing training data and generating outputs. It says the statutory framework permits up to $150,000 for each willful copyright infringement and up to $25,000 for each violation involving removal of copyright-management information. The plaintiffs have demanded a jury trial.

The requested copyright injunction is distinct from Florida’s bid for court limits on OpenAI model development and ChatGPT behavior, which arises from a separate case.

The filing adds 19 publications to an expanding set of newspaper copyright challenges to generative-AI training. Eight newspapers owned by Alden Global Capital sued OpenAI and Microsoft in April 2024, and The Seattle Times and Newsday brought another case in September 2026. OpenAI had not provided a case-specific response by the time of the reporting reviewed for this story.