USA Today Co., Inc. and 13 affiliated newspapers have sued seven OpenAI entities, seeking more than $250 million over allegations that the company used their copyrighted reporting to train its artificial intelligence models without permission. The fourteen USA TODAY/Gannett-related corporate plaintiffs filed the case on 8 October 2026 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The 79-page complaint, USA TODAY Co., Inc. et al. v. OpenAI Foundation et al., No. 1:26-cv-08892, demands a jury trial. Steven Lieberman of Rothwell, Figg Ernst represents the publisher in the Southern District case.
The plaintiffs say OpenAI took their work to build products worth hundreds of billions of dollars, despite never seeking permission.
The publications covered by the suit are USA TODAY, The Tennessean, Indy Star, The Bergen Record, The Enquirer, Asbury Park Press, Democrat & Chronicle, The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Naples Daily News, The Oklahoman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Columbus Dispatch, The Arizona Republic, The Courier-Journal, The Des Moines Register, Detroit Free Press, The Detroit News, The Palm Beach Post and Star News.
The complaint alleges that the publishers' papers supplied over 160,000 entries to WebText, a dataset OpenAI built to train its GPT-2 model. It also says a 2019 snapshot of Common Crawl called C4 contains over 122 million tokens from the publishers' papers, including 23 million tokens from usatoday.com alone.
The filing offers URL- and domain-specific evidence that USA TODAY material appeared in OpenAI training corpora. It reproduces one GPT-5.6 output example for each of the 19 publications, including examples where GPT-5.6 retrieved articles from outlets such as the Indianapolis Star and Detroit Free Press.
It also names Dragnet, Newspaper and Gutentag as OpenAI preprocessing tools allegedly set up to remove copyright-management information. The complaint says the tools targeted terms including 'byline', 'copyright' and '©'.
The case brings three claims: direct copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. §501, vicarious copyright infringement, and intentional removal of copyright-management information under DMCA §1202.
The plaintiffs seek declaratory and permanent injunctive relief, profits or disgorgement, fees, and destruction of every GPT/LLM model and training set that incorporates their content. Their damages claim includes up to $150,000 for each work they say was wilfully infringed, and up to $25,000 for every alleged removal of copyright information.
OpenAI's Head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, wrote that publishers face an 'existential threat' from OpenAI's products. He said they 'are largely substitutive, period' and 'will get more and more substitutive as they get better'.
An OpenAI software engineer wrote that 'no matter how prominently we show the links, users won't click'.
Microsoft and OpenAI have argued that their systems make fair use of copyrighted material because they transform it. Spokespeople for OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the new case.
The lawsuit joins high-stakes copyright cases against technology companies including Anthropic and Meta Platforms. Reuters independently reported the filing and case number on 8 October 2026.
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