USA Today Co and several newspapers it owns sued OpenAI in Manhattan federal court on Thursday for allegedly infringing their copyrights by using their content to train its large language models, Reuters reported. The lawsuit said OpenAI copied hundreds of thousands of the outlets' articles and other materials and used them without permission to train the system behind its popular chatbot ChatGPT.
Spokespeople for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the complaint. USA Today requested damages in excess of $250 million and a court order blocking OpenAI's alleged infringement.
The complaint is one of dozens of high-stakes lawsuits filed by copyright owners against tech companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms for allegedly misusing their work in AI training. Tech companies have argued that their systems make fair use of copyrighted material by transforming it into something new — a defense that has yet to be definitively tested at trial in the biggest cases.
OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, are facing similar claims in Manhattan court from prominent authors and news outlets including the New York Times. The Times' lawsuit, filed in late 2023, remains the highest-profile of the media cases and is being closely watched as a potential bellwether for the entire industry.
The case is USA Today Co v. OpenAI Foundation, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 1:26-cv-08892. For USA Today, Steven Lieberman of Rothwell Figg Ernst & Manbeck is representing the publisher. Attorney information for OpenAI was not yet available.
The lawsuit reflects the news industry's escalating confrontation with the AI boom. Publishers argue that chatbots built on their reporting are siphoning readers and advertising revenue while the companies behind them reap enormous valuations. Some outlets, including the Associated Press and Axel Springer, have struck licensing deals with AI firms, but many others have chosen litigation, betting that courts will force the industry to pay for the content it was built on.
For OpenAI, now valued at $850 billion and pursuing a public offering, the mounting legal docket represents one of the biggest overhangs on its business. A loss in any of the major copyright cases could force fundamental changes to how its models are trained — or result in damages running into the billions. The publisher's complaint argues that AI companies should pay for the journalism their models are built on, the same argument at the heart of the Times case and the author suits. How courts answer that question will shape the business of both news and artificial intelligence for years.