USA Today Co. and 19 affiliated publications filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on October 8, 2026, in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs are seeking damages exceeding $250 million, alleging that the company used hundreds of thousands of their articles to train its GPT models without authorization.
The legal complaint identifies that over 160,000 articles from the publisher's domains were included in training datasets such as WebText and C4. Specifically, the filing claims that 83,266 articles originated from usatoday.com. The plaintiffs are also seeking injunctive relief to prevent further unauthorized copying.
The lawsuit asserts that OpenAI removed copyright management information, including bylines and titles, from the content. The filing references outputs from models like GPT-5.6 to support claims that the technology reproduces original work. US copyright law allows for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per willful infringement.
This case joins a series of similar legal actions against OpenAI from organizations including The New York Times, The Intercept, Ziff Davis, and CBC/Radio-Canada. Many of these lawsuits have been consolidated into a multidistrict litigation in the Southern District of New York to manage shared issues such as evidence gathering.
