USA Today Co. and 19 affiliated newspapers sued OpenAI in Manhattan federal court on October 8, alleging the company copied hundreds of thousands of their copyrighted articles without permission to train the large language models behind ChatGPT. The complaint seeks damages in excess of $250 million plus a court order blocking the alleged infringement. The case is USA Today Co. v. OpenAI Foundation, 1:26-cv-08892, in the Southern District of New York.

The complaint names publications including USA Today, The Tennessean, the Detroit Free Press, The Arizona Republic and The Indianapolis Star. It points to large training datasets such as WebText and C4, claiming more than 160,000 articles from the plaintiffs' domains appear in them, roughly 83,266 from usatoday.com alone. It also accuses OpenAI of stripping copyright management information like bylines and notices, a separate potential DMCA violation.

The suit joins a growing consolidation of publisher copyright litigation against OpenAI in the same court, alongside the New York Times case, and could test whether web-scraped news content used in training triggers licensing obligations. OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing.