USA Today Co. sues OpenAI for training AI on 19 publications, seeks over $250 million

#What happened

• Filed Thursday, October 8, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (docket No. 1:26-cv-08892), styled USA Today Co. v. OpenAI Foundation.
• The complaint alleges OpenAI copied hundreds of thousands of articles and other materials from 19 publications and used them without permission to train the system behind ChatGPT.
• Named publications include USA TODAY, The Tennessean, the Detroit Free Press, The Arizona Republic, The Indianapolis Star, The Columbus Dispatch, and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
• The suit seeks damages "in excess of $250 million" plus a court order blocking the alleged infringement.
• OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
• The complaint says models at issue span GPT-1 through GPT-6.1 and GPT-OSS, and demands a jury trial.
• It is one of dozens of high-stakes copyright suits by copyright owners against AI labs; OpenAI and Microsoft face similar claims in Manhattan from authors and outlets including the New York Times.

#Why it matters

• Another major publisher is testing whether AI training on copyrighted news is fair use, raising the stakes on licensing costs for model training.
• The complaint also alleges ChatGPT can reproduce or summarize articles in ways that substitute for readers visiting the original publications, putting subscription and ad revenue at issue.