USA Today Co. and 18 affiliated newspapers filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on October 8, 2026, in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs allege that the company used hundreds of thousands of unlicensed articles to train its AI models, including GPT-5.6.
The legal complaint, identified as Case No. 1:26-cv-08892, specifies that over 160,000 entries from the publishers' domains were included in OpenAI's WebText corpus. Of these, 83,266 articles originated from usatoday.com. The lawsuit claims the model outputs mirror the structure and content of the original journalism.
The publishers are seeking damages exceeding $250 million and the destruction of models trained on their copyrighted material. The suit includes allegations of direct and vicarious copyright infringement, as well as violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act regarding the removal of copyright management information.
The plaintiffs claim that OpenAI stripped identifying data, such as bylines and copyright notices, from the articles. They are pursuing statutory damages of up to $150,000 per willful infringement and $25,000 per violation involving the removal of copyright management information, alongside injunctive relief.
This case follows similar legal actions brought against OpenAI by The New York Times, The Intercept, and a coalition of nearly 400 local newspapers. As of October 9, 2026, OpenAI had not provided a public response to the filing.
