USA Today sues OpenAI for over $250 million alleging copyright infringement

USA Today Co., Inc. and 13 affiliated entities filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in New York on October 8, 2026, seeking over $250 million in damages. The lawsuit alleges OpenAI copied hundreds of thousands of articles without permission to train its models, including ChatGPT. The plaintiffs claim this unauthorized use causes severe financial harm by diverting readers, citing internal OpenAI documents that describe ChatGPT as a substitutive threat that prevents users from clicking links.

USA Today lawsuit against OpenAI

• ▪USA Today Co., Inc. and 13 affiliated entities filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in a New York federal court on Thursday, October 8, 2026
• ▪The lawsuit filed by USA Today Co., Inc. seeks more than $250 million in damages from OpenAI, including up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work
• ▪The 19 publications involved in the lawsuit filed by USA Today Co., Inc. on October 8, 2026 include USA TODAY, The Tennessean, Indy Star, The Columbus Dispatch, The Oklahoman, and Detroit Free Press

Training data copyright infringement claims

• ▪The lawsuit filed by USA Today Co., Inc. alleges OpenAI designed programs to strip away Copyright Management Information from the copyrighted works used to train its models
• ▪The lawsuit filed by USA Today Co., Inc. on October 8, 2026 alleges OpenAI copied hundreds of thousands of articles from 19 publications without permission to train and operate its artificial intelligence models
• ▪The lawsuit filed by USA Today Co., Inc. on October 8, 2026 claims its papers make up over 160,000 entries in OpenAI's WebText dataset and over 122 million tokens in a 2019 Common Crawl snapshot

ChatGPT content reproduction substitution

• ▪The lawsuit filed by USA Today Co., Inc. on October 8, 2026 claims OpenAI's paid agreements with other news organizations prove that OpenAI knows news content requires a licensing agreement
• ▪The lawsuit filed by USA Today Co., Inc. on October 8, 2026 alleges OpenAI's models reproduce or repackage reporting, citing examples where GPT-5.6 retrieved articles and produced in-depth summaries

Publisher financial harm from AI

• ▪The lawsuit filed by USA Today Co., Inc. on October 8, 2026 claims OpenAI's unauthorized use of content causes substantial financial harm to publications that rely on reader visits and subscriptions to fund reporting
• ▪The New York Times previously filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023 alleging copyright infringement, trademark issues, and misappropriation

OpenAI internal documents on substitution

• ▪The lawsuit filed by USA Today Co., Inc. on October 8, 2026 cites an internal OpenAI software engineer's quote stating that users will not click links no matter how prominently they are shown
• ▪The lawsuit filed by USA Today Co., Inc. on October 8, 2026 cites OpenAI's Head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, as writing that publishers face an existential threat from OpenAI's products

Debatable claims

• ▪AI-generated news summaries pose an existential threat to journalism
• ▪AI companies bear responsibility for the financial decline of news publishers
• ▪Training AI models on copyrighted news constitutes fair use
• ▪Courts should order the destruction of AI models trained on unauthorized copyrighted data