USA Today Sues OpenAI Over Copyright Infringement
USA Today Co. and 18 affiliated newspapers filed a federal lawsuit seeking over $250 million from OpenAI for unauthorized AI training.
USA Today Sues OpenAI Over Copyright Infringement
USA Today Co. and 18 affiliated newspapers filed a federal lawsuit seeking over $250 million from OpenAI for unauthorized AI training.
Lawsuit Filed in Federal Court
USA Today Co. and 18 of its affiliated newspapers have initiated legal action against OpenAI in federal court, alleging that the artificial intelligence company trained its models on their journalism without permission or compensation. According to CryptoBriefing, the complaint was filed on October 8, 2026, in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York under Case No. 1:26-cv-08892.
The plaintiffs are seeking more than $250 million in damages alongside an order for the destruction of any AI models allegedly trained on their copyrighted material. The lawsuit states that OpenAI utilized hundreds of thousands of unlicenced articles from the publications to develop its artificial intelligence systems.
Specific Allegations and Corpus Data
The publishers support their legal claims with detailed figures included in the complaint. The filing asserts that over 160,000 entries originating from the plaintiffs' domains appear inside OpenAI's WebText corpus, which serves as a collection of web text used for training language models.
Out of those entries, the complaint notes that 83,266 came directly from usatoday.com, with the remaining items distributed among the affiliated newspapers. Furthermore, the lawsuit targets the capabilities of GPT-5.6, claiming that the model's outputs mirror the structure and content of the original news articles.
Copyright and DMCA Violations
The legal action pursues multiple theories simultaneously, covering direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, and violations related to copyright management information, or CMI. CMI includes identifying details attached to published works, such as titles, bylines, and copyright notices.
The complaint alleges that OpenAI stripped this identifying information from the copied articles, which falls under violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Statutory damages could potentially reach up to $150,000 per willful infringement and $25,000 per DMCA violation involving CMI removal, while plaintiffs are also requesting injunctive relief to halt the alleged conduct.
Legal Representation and Industry Context
The plaintiffs are represented by Steven Lieberman of the law firm Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck. As of October 9, 2026, OpenAI had not yet responded to the lawsuit or issued public comments regarding the filing.
This legal challenge follows previous actions from other news organizations against OpenAI, including lawsuits brought by The New York Times, The Intercept, and a coalition representing nearly 400 local newspapers.
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