USA TODAY Sues OpenAI Over Copyrighted News Content in AI Training

USA TODAY Co., Inc. and its affiliated newspaper entities sued OpenAI in federal court in New York on October 8, 2026, alleging the company trained its GPT models on hundreds of thousands of their copyrighted articles without authorization and repackaged their journalism in chatbot outputs that substitute for the originals. The suit seeks damages in excess of $250 million.

The Filing and Requested Relief

The case, USA Today Co., Inc. v. OpenAI Foundation, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York by attorney Steven Lieberman of Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck. The complaint was entered on October 8, 2026, accompanied by an exhibit of copyright registrations and a second exhibit of GPT-5.6 output examples, according to the court docket. Same-day docket entries include a civil cover sheet, a copyright notice form, a notice of appearance, and a request for issuance of summons.

A statement of relatedness filed the same day asks that the action be treated as related to the consolidated OpenAI copyright infringement litigation already pending in the same court. The complaint states that the plaintiffs join a long list of copyright holders that have sued OpenAI and other AI companies, many of those cases consolidated in that court.

Under the statutory framework the complaint cites, the plaintiffs may recover up to $150,000 for each willful copyright infringement, plus up to $25,000 per violation for the removal of copyright management information, the ownership and rights data attached to published works. The plaintiffs allege OpenAI’s models copied hundreds of thousands of articles and other materials from their publications.

Training-Data and Copying Allegations

According to the complaint, OpenAI’s large language models were trained on copyrighted material scraped from the internet without authorization, regardless of paywalls or other access restrictions, and OpenAI used programs designed to strip away copyright management information indicating the works were protected. The complaint also cites written evidence OpenAI submitted to a British House of Lords inquiry in December 2023, in which the company stated that because copyright covers virtually every sort of human expression, limiting training data to public-domain works would not produce AI systems that meet current needs.

The complaint states that content from the plaintiffs’ publications comprises more than 160,000 entries in WebText, the internal corpus OpenAI built to train GPT-2, including 83,266 entries from usatoday.com and 12,994 entries from freep.com. It states the publications’ domains account for more than 122 million tokens in C4, a filtered English-language subset of a 2019 snapshot of the Common Crawl web archive, and reproduces OpenAI’s published GPT-3 training mix, which weighted Common Crawl at 60 percent and WebText2, an expanded version of the WebText corpus, at 22 percent.

To argue that OpenAI understood what its models contained, the complaint quotes internal communications. It states that co-founder Greg Brockman told colleagues the models were particularly good at predicting the text of news articles, and that a 2020 presentation by then-research leader Dario Amodei listed news generation among GPT-3’s skills. It quotes OpenAI’s VP of Research stating, “We train our networks to memorize the training data — that’s their objective,” and cites June 2022 internal messages in which employees acknowledged that GPT-4 would have memorized a large amount of data and would be highly effective at regurgitating it.

The complaint further alleges that over a three-year period Microsoft provided OpenAI with a copy of the Bing Index, a compilation of billions of webpages scraped for Microsoft’s search engine that included the plaintiffs’ content, under an initiative codenamed Project Taxi, and that Microsoft separately developed and operated a crawler called Project Mango on OpenAI’s behalf, for which OpenAI paid Microsoft. It also alleges that OpenAI’s output filters did not suppress content from any entity that had not sued the company, an approach it says a Microsoft executive described internally as an accidental cover-up.

GPT-5.6 Output Examples

The filing reproduces examples in which GPT-5.6, prompted to find and summarize a specific article by title, produced what the complaint describes as extensive multi-section summaries paraphrasing the originals and following their structural organization. The reproduced examples involve articles from the Indianapolis Star, the Detroit Free Press, The Knoxville News-Sentinel, The Palm Beach Post, The Tennessean, The Enquirer, The Des Moines Register, The Courier-Journal, the Naples Daily News, the Asbury Park Press, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Columbus Dispatch, The Oklahoman, and the Star News, with full versions attached as an exhibit.

The complaint alleges OpenAI affirmatively post-trained its models to summarize copyrighted articles in lieu of returning the articles themselves, producing substitutes that serve the same informative purpose as the originals. It quotes OpenAI’s Head of ChatGPT acknowledging that once ChatGPT gives an answer there is “no good reason to click” a link to the underlying source, and cites an OpenAI engineer’s statement that no matter how prominently links are displayed, users will not click. When OpenAI’s outputs reproduce or repackage their content, the plaintiffs allege, users have no reason to visit the original sources or pay for a subscription.

The Parties

The plaintiffs, all owned by USA TODAY Co., Inc., hold copyrights in content published by 19 publications, including USA TODAY, The Tennessean, the Indy Star, The Bergen Record, The Enquirer, the Asbury Park Press, the Democrat & Chronicle, The Knoxville News-Sentinel, the Naples Daily News, The Oklahoman, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Columbus Dispatch, The Arizona Republic, The Courier-Journal, The Des Moines Register, the Detroit Free Press, The Detroit News, The Palm Beach Post, and the Star News. The complaint describes USA TODAY Co., formerly Gannett Co., Inc., as a diversified media company tracing its history to 1906 that publishes USA TODAY and hundreds of daily publications, and states that its publications have won dozens of Pulitzer Prizes and employ hundreds of journalists across thirteen states.

The defendants are OpenAI Foundation; OpenAI GP, LLC; OAI International, Inc.; OpenAI OpCo, LLC; OpenAI Global, LLC; OAI Corporation; and OpenAI Group PBC, each described in the complaint as a San Francisco-based entity that was directly involved in or profited from the alleged infringement. The complaint recounts OpenAI’s October 28, 2025 recapitalization, under which the nonprofit became the OpenAI Foundation, holding equity in the for-profit that OpenAI described as valued at approximately $130 billion, and the for-profit became OpenAI Group PBC, a public benefit corporation. Citing OpenAI’s own disclosures, the complaint states that ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million paying subscribers as of March 2026.

The models at issue span GPT-1 through GPT-6.1 and GPT-OSS, including all Instant, Thinking, mini, nano, and Pro variants, according to the complaint. The plaintiffs demand a jury trial.