USA Today files OpenAI lawsuit for 19 newspapers, seeks over $250m

USA Today Co., the publisher formerly known as Gannett, filed an OpenAI lawsuit on 8 October in the federal court for the Southern District of New York. The company and 19 of its titles, including USA Today, the Detroit Free Press and The Arizona Republic, seek damages “in excess of $250 million”, according to the complaint.

USA Today says OpenAI copied paywalled articles

The papers say OpenAI trained its GPT models on hundreds of thousands of their articles without permission, including stories behind paywalls. The complaint counts 83,266 entries from usatoday.com in WebText, a dataset used to train the models. It also says OpenAI removed bylines, titles and copyright notices from the copied text.

The publisher says ChatGPT summaries keep readers away

The complaint argues that ChatGPT now summarises the papers’ stories instead of sending people to them. That gives readers less reason to visit or subscribe. According to the filing, ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly users in March 2026. It also quotes OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT saying there is “no good reason to click” on a source link. Similar internal remarks came out earlier in unsealed files from the New York Times case.

USA Today Co. wants to join the OpenAI cases already in Manhattan

The papers asked the court to treat their suit as related to the copyright cases against OpenAI that are already combined there. They also asked for a jury trial. The same Manhattan court heard the New York Times dispute, in which the US government backed OpenAI on fair use.

The money claim rests on two limits in US copyright law. Courts can award up to $150,000 for each wilful infringement and up to $25,000 for each removed copyright notice. The papers put the total above $250 million.