OpenAI faces copyright lawsuits from major publications over AI training

America’s newspapers have found a common enemy, and it isn’t each other for once. The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and now USA Today have all taken OpenAI to court over how ChatGPT learned to write. The publishers allege that OpenAI fed their journalism into its models without permission, in ways that break copyright law. OpenAI says it didn’t need permission at all. And the US government has just picked a side. The newest lawsuit carries a nine-figure price tag The latest entrant is USA Today Co., which filed suit on October 8, 2026. It named both OpenAI and Microsoft as defendants. The complaint alleges that the companies scraped a large volume of articles from 19 affiliated publications without authorization. USA Today Co. is seeking over $250 million in damages. The New York Times got there first. It sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, and that case has since been folded into a larger multidistrict litigation, or MDL. An MDL works a bit like a carpool for lawsuits. Instead of dozens of separate cases crawling through different courtrooms, related claims get consolidated so pretrial issues can be handled once. Numerous other publishers have joined that consolidate...