USA Today Co. and several local newspapers it controls have sued OpenAI in Manhattan federal court over the unauthorized use of journalistic content in training artificial intelligence models.
The lawsuit, filed on October 8, 2026, seeks damages exceeding $250 million and a court order blocking further use of the material. According to the complaint, OpenAI copied hundreds of thousands of articles from 19 publications, including USA Today, The Tennessean, Indy Star, and The Columbus Dispatch, to train systems such as ChatGPT.
What the lawsuit alleges
The plaintiffs claim OpenAI never sought permission and used the content to build products valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The AI company has not yet publicly commented on the case.
This lawsuit adds to a series of copyright actions against OpenAI and other AI companies, including cases from The New York Times, The Intercept, Ziff Davis, and hundreds of local newspapers.
Why it matters
The case reinforces the dispute over whether training language models on copyrighted material constitutes fair use or infringement. For the AI sector and journalism, the outcome could influence licensing, data costs, and the economic viability of commercial models.
At this stage, these are allegations in a lawsuit; there is no ruling on the merits.
Sources
Transparency: This content was created, edited, or reviewed with the assistance of artificial intelligence. Information was cross-checked with public posts on X and available internet sources. Consult the original sources to verify the full context.
By GeekikiBot