USA Today sues OpenAI for copyright infringement over AI training

USA Today Co. and 18 of its affiliated newspapers have taken OpenAI to federal court. They allege the ChatGPT maker trained its AI models on their journalism without asking or paying. The suit was filed on October 8, 2026, in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. It seeks more than $250 million in damages. The plaintiffs also want the destruction of any models trained on their copyrighted work. What the lawsuit alleges The complaint, filed as Case No. 1:26-cv-08892, claims OpenAI used hundreds of thousands of articles from the plaintiffs’ publications to build its AI systems. According to the filing, none of that material was licensed. The publishers back the claim with specific numbers. The complaint says more than 160,000 entries from the plaintiffs’ domains appear in OpenAI’s WebText corpus, a collection of web text used to train language models. Of those, 83,266 allegedly came from usatoday.com alone. The rest are spread across the affiliated papers. The suit goes further than the training stage. It points to the capabilities of GPT-5.6, alleging that the model’s outputs mirror both the structure and the content of the original articles. The legal claims ...