USA Today Co. sues OpenAI for more than $250M over AI training data
Key Summary
USA Today Co. has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging the AI model training company copied hundreds of thousands of articles from its publications without permission. The complaint seeks over $250 million in damages and a court order to stop the alleged copying. The lawsuit is the latest in a growing line of publishers taking OpenAI to court over copyright infringement claims.
Background
USA Today Co. has joined the growing line of publishers taking OpenAI to court. The newspaper company and the local papers it owns are seeking more than $250 million in damages over claims that OpenAI copied their journalism to train its AI models. The complaint alleges OpenAI took hundreds of thousands of articles without permission. The suit was filed on October 8, 2026, in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. It carries case number 1:26-cv-08892, and Reuters was first to report it. The plaintiffs are USA Today Co., Inc. and 19 affiliated publications. Together they argue that OpenAI's unauthorized use of their reporting has caused harm to their outlets that is real and continuing. The complaint gets specific about where the content allegedly ended up. It points to large training datasets, including WebText and C4, which fed OpenAI's GPT models. Inside those datasets, the plaintiffs say they found over 160,000 articles from their domains. Approximately 83,266 of those came from usatoday.com alone. The plaintiffs also want injunctive relief, meaning a court order to stop the alleged copying from continuing.
Legal Action
The filing also cites outputs from OpenAI models, including GPT-5.6. Publishers in these cases typically use such examples to argue the models can reproduce or closely track their original work, not just learn general patterns from it. The complaint also highlights OpenAI's commercial success and its shift to for-profit operations. OpenAI has not publicly responded to the allegations in this case. OpenAI is also facing legal action from The Intercept, CNET owner Ziff Davis, and Canadian broadcaster CBC/Radio-Canada, among others. Many of these claims have been consolidated into a multidistrict litigation, or MDL, in the same Southern District of New York court. An MDL bundles similar cases before one judge to handle shared issues like evidence gathering, while each plaintiff keeps its own claims.