USA Today Co. sues OpenAI, alleging it copied articles from 19 outlets to train ChatGPT

USA Today Co. and 13 affiliated entities sued OpenAI in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday, October 8, 2026. The suit alleges that OpenAI copied hundreds of thousands of articles from 19 publications without permission. The complaint says OpenAI used those articles to train the models behind ChatGPT and then reproduced or repackaged the reporting for users. The publisher, formerly known as Gannett, is seeking damages “in excess of $250 million” and a court order blocking the alleged infringement, Reuters reported. The case is USA Today Co v. OpenAI Foundation, No. 1:26-cv-08892, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

What the complaint alleges

According to Forbes, the complaint says the plaintiffs’ papers account for more than 160,000 entries in WebText, a dataset OpenAI built to train GPT-2. It also says they account for more than 122 million tokens in C4, a 2019 snapshot of Common Crawl. Of those, 23 million tokens came from usatoday.com. Louisville Public Media reported that the Courier Journal’s website alone accounted for 3.1 million tokens.

The filing includes examples in which, it says, an OpenAI model retrieved articles from outlets such as the Indianapolis Star and the Detroit Free Press and produced in-depth summaries. One exhibit compares a Courier Journal article with a ChatGPT response that the suit says mirrors it.

The plaintiffs accuse OpenAI of willful infringement. The complaint says OpenAI “knew or should have known” its models were copying content “on a massive scale during training.” It argues that OpenAI’s paid licensing deals with other news organizations show the company knows a license is required. The suit also alleges that OpenAI used programs that stripped copyright management information from the works.

OpenAI’s own words

The complaint quotes internal OpenAI material, some of it from recently unredacted documents in the New York Times lawsuit. According to the filing, Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, wrote that publishers face an “existential threat” from OpenAI’s products. He also wrote that the products “are largely substitutive, period” and “will get more and more substitutive as they get better.” The suit says an OpenAI software engineer wrote that “no matter how prominently we show the links, users won’t click.”

The complaint also cites a Microsoft executive. In documents from the Times case, that executive described OpenAI’s unauthorized use of copyrighted content as “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”

What is at stake

Forbes reported that the plaintiffs seek up to $150,000 for each willfully infringed work and up to $25,000 for each instance of stripped copyright information. They also ask the court to order the destruction of GPT models and training sets that incorporate content from the 19 publications. They have requested a jury trial.

The publications include USA Today, The Tennessean, The Arizona Republic, the Detroit Free Press, The Detroit News, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Columbus Dispatch, The Oklahoman, The Des Moines Register and the Courier Journal.

The suit says OpenAI’s conduct has caused substantial financial harm to papers that depend on readers visiting their sites and paying for content.

A growing list of suits

OpenAI already faces copyright claims from The New York Times, The Intercept, Ziff Davis, CBC/Radio-Canada, Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Seattle Times and a coalition of nearly 400 local newspapers, The Verge reported. Many of these cases are consolidated in Manhattan. Reuters reported that tech companies have argued their systems make fair use of copyrighted material by transforming it into something new.