OpenAI sued for over $250 million by USA Today owner

The parent company of USA Today, USA Today Co., Inc., and 13 of its affiliated entities filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in a New York federal court on October 8, 2026. The plaintiffs seek more than $250 million in damages, accusing the artificial intelligence company of illegally copying hundreds of thousands of articles from 19 publications to train and operate its models, and later reproducing or repackaging that reporting for ChatGPT users.

The claim includes statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each intentionally infringed work and up to $25,000 for each instance where OpenAI stripped copyright management information. The lawsuit states that the publishers' articles comprise more than 160,000 entries in WebText, a dataset built by OpenAI to train GPT-2, as well as over 122 million tokens in a 2019 Common Crawl snapshot called C4, which includes 23 million tokens from usatoday.com.

According to the complaint, GPT-5.6 retrieved articles from publications such as the Indianapolis Star and Detroit Free Press, generating detailed summaries when prompted. In addition to a jury trial, the publishers are asking the court for an order requiring the destruction of GPT models and training datasets that incorporate content from the 19 publications, which also include The Tennessean, The Arizona Republic, and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The filing quotes OpenAI's head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, who reportedly wrote that publishers face an existential threat from OpenAI products and that they are largely substitutive. The lawsuit also references internal OpenAI documents and statements from an OpenAI software engineer noting that users do not click links regardless of how prominently they are displayed.

For listed publishers such as Gannett, the parent group behind USA Today and its regional network, the legal action represents an effort to protect proprietary reporting and subscription revenue streams from unauthorized use in generative artificial intelligence platforms.