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USA Today Co. alleges OpenAI copied its papers without paying
The News
USA Today Co. and 13 companies it owns sued seven OpenAI entities in federal court in Manhattan on October 8, 2026, alleging OpenAI copied journalism from their 19 publications without permission, both to train its models and to answer users. The complaint seeks damages in excess of $250 million. None of its claims has been tested in court.
Chandni Melwani
Founder & Editor
Oct 8, 2026 · 1 MIN READ
Know More
- — Case: USA Today Co. v. OpenAI Foundation, No. 1:26-cv-08892, US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
- — Defendants: OpenAI Foundation, the nonprofit, OpenAI Group PBC, the for-profit, and five other OpenAI entities.
- — Destruction sought: under 17 U.S.C. § 503(b), all GPT or other LLM models and training sets incorporating their content.
- — OpenAI's response: none found as of the evening of October 8, 2026.
WebText, an internal corpus OpenAI used to train GPT-2, held 83,266 entries from usatoday.com, according to the complaint USA Today Co. filed on October 8, 2026. Across its papers’ sites, it counts more than 160,000.
The filing says that, asked to find articles by headline and give “an in-depth summary,” GPT-5.6 retrieved Indianapolis Star and Knoxville News-Sentinel stories and returned summaries that kept the originals’ structure.
Microsoft is not a defendant, though the complaint says it gave OpenAI a copy of its Bing search index, including the plaintiffs’ content, in an initiative codenamed Project Taxi. The complaint also alleges OpenAI removed authors’ names and copyright notices from copies of their articles, the kind of claim Sony and Warner brought against Anthropic.
As Gannett, its former name, USA Today Co. announced a July 2025 deal licensing USA Today Network content to Perplexity, with chief executive Michael Reed committing to ensure its content is “properly attributed” and the company “fairly compensated.”
The Read
The complaint says OpenAI 'never offered payment' for these papers' work, and that its deals with the Associated Press, Axel Springer and others 'prove that OpenAI understands' using copyrighted journalism 'requires permission and payment.' The plaintiffs filed a statement asking that the case be filed as related to the consolidated OpenAI copyright litigation, so it will probably join it.
Room for Disagreement
A deal can buy more than permission. AP says its 2023 agreement licensed part of its text archive to OpenAI and let AP use OpenAI's technology, and the complaint says OpenAI struck a deal to license its GPT models to AP. Payment need not show a licence was required.
Related
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a court really order OpenAI's models destroyed?
The complaint asks for it under section 503(b) of the Copyright Act, which lets a court, as part of a final judgment or decree, order the destruction or other reasonable disposition of all copies found to have been made or used in violation of the copyright owner's exclusive rights, and of all other articles by means of which such copies may be reproduced. Treating trained models and training sets that way is the plaintiffs' request, and no court has ruled on it in this case.
Where does the $250 million figure come from?
The complaint states the figure without showing a calculation. It alleges OpenAI's models copied 'hundreds of thousands of articles and other materials' from the plaintiffs' publications, and says the law lets the plaintiffs recover up to $150,000 for each willful copyright infringement, plus up to $25,000 per violation for stripping copyright management information. Under the Copyright Act, $150,000 per work is the most a court may award in statutory damages, at its discretion, where it finds the infringement was willful.
Which OpenAI models and products does the suit cover?
The complaint names GPT models from GPT-1 to GPT-6.1, the o1, o3 and o4 models and GPT-OSS, 'and all variations thereof', including 'Instant,' 'Thinking,' 'mini,' 'nano' and 'Pro' variants. Its product list runs from the API platform and ChatGPT's Free, Plus and Pro tiers to ChatGPT Search, ChatGPT Agent and ChatGPT Atlas.
Sources
- Complaint, USA Today Co. v. OpenAI Foundation, No. 1:26-cv-08892 (S.D.N.Y.), Document 1, filed October 8, 2026, via CourtListener's RECAP archive. Source for the parties, the 19 publications, the damages figure, the WebText counts, the GPT-5.6 examples, the Microsoft allegations, the licensing-deals argument and the relief requested.
- CourtListener docket, USA Today Co., Inc. v. OpenAI Foundation (S.D.N.Y.), entries read through CourtListener's search API. Entry 3, the plaintiffs' statement of relatedness, asks that the action be filed as related to 1:25-md-03143.
- Gannett press release, 'Gannett | USA TODAY Network and Perplexity Announce Strategic AI Content Licensing Agreement,' July 30, 2025. The Perplexity licence and Michael Reed's 'fairly compensated' remark.
- AP press release on its 2023 agreement with OpenAI: OpenAI licenses part of AP's text archive, and AP will leverage OpenAI's technology and product expertise.
- 17 U.S.C. § 503, GovInfo (US Code, 2023 edition). Subsection (b), on destruction or other reasonable disposition, as part of a final judgment or decree, of copies found to have been made or used in violation of the copyright owner's exclusive rights.
- 17 U.S.C. § 504, GovInfo (US Code, 2023 edition). Subsection (c)(1), statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action with respect to any one work, and subsection (c)(2), the court's discretion to increase that award to not more than $150,000 where it finds infringement was committed willfully.
- Hero photo: Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse, Manhattan, New York, by Ken Lund, Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0
- Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic licence, which applies to the hero photo
Chandni Melwani
Chandni Melwani is the founder and editor of New in AI, covering AI agents, M&A, and enterprise adoption. She holds a Master's in Management of Artificial Intelligence from Queen's University and brings a practitioner's perspective from her work in Data and AI leadership.
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