USA TODAY sues OpenAI over copyrighted news used in AI training

USA TODAY Co. and affiliated newspapers sued OpenAI in New York federal court on October 8, 2026, seeking more than $250 million. The suit alleges GPT models were trained on hundreds of thousands of copyrighted articles and that chatbot outputs repackage their journalism as substitutes for the originals.

• The suit seeks over $250 million and was filed in the Southern District of New York
• Statutory damages could reach $150,000 per willful infringement
• WebText for GPT-2 included 83,266 entries from usatoday.com and 12,994 from freep.com
• The complaint covers content from 19 publications, including USA TODAY and Detroit Free Press