USA Today Co. sues OpenAI for more than 250 million dollars over alleged copyright infringement
USA Today Co. and its affiliated newspapers filed a copyright suit against OpenAI, alleging that hundreds of thousands of their articles went into ChatGPT training data.
USA Today Co. and 13 affiliated entities filed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI on 8 October 2026. According to Editor & Publisher, the plaintiffs say ChatGPT's training data includes hundreds of thousands of articles taken from 19 of their newspapers, and they seek more than 250 million dollars in damages.
According to Editor & Publisher on 12 October 2026, USA Today Co., formerly Gannett, and 13 affiliated entities sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI on Thursday, 8 October. Reuters first reported the lawsuit.
- The plaintiffs allege that hundreds of thousands of articles from 19 of their newspapers ended up in ChatGPT's training data, and that the chatbot draws on them when responding to users.
- They seek more than 250 million dollars in damages, a jury trial and a court order for the destruction of GPT models built using their reporting.
- According to TheDesk, the complaint says OpenAI's WebText training dataset contains more than 160,000 entries from USA Today-owned publications.
- TheDesk reports that OpenAI has not commented on the lawsuit.
Why it matters
TheDesk reports that the complaint also claims ChatGPT's news summaries cause a significant drop in the publishers' web traffic and advertising revenue. The same report says some publishers are pushing for tougher rules; one proposed federal law would oblige tech companies to respect publishers' requests to keep AI bots out. Citing The Verge, Editor & Publisher notes that the case is the most recent of several copyright suits brought against OpenAI. For companies in Türkiye that publish content, it could be a reason to state clearly in their terms of use whether and how their content may be used for AI training. Companies buying AI tools may also want to review the training data and copyright clauses in their supplier contracts.
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