USA Today owner sues OpenAI over alleged copyright infringement

USA Today Co., which owns USA Today along with a group of local newspapers, has sued OpenAI, accusing the company of copying “hundreds of thousands” of articles to train its AI models without permission or payment. The filing, submitted Thursday, seeks damages of more than $250 million.

The lawsuit names USA Today alongside several local papers under the same ownership, including The Tennessean, Indy Star, The Columbus Dispatch, and The Oklahoman. According to the filing, OpenAI’s use of this content “has done real and continuing” harm to these outlets. The complaint also alleges that OpenAI never sought permission before using the material, instead taking the publisher’s content to “build products worth hundreds of billions of dollars,” a reference to the company’s valuation rather than a figure confirmed in the suit itself.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge, which first reported the filing.

Part of a growing legal front

This lawsuit adds to a long and growing list of copyright claims against OpenAI. The New York Times filed its own suit earlier, and OpenAI is also facing legal action from The Intercept, CNET owner Ziff Davis, CBC/Radio-Canada, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Merriam-Webster, The Seattle Times, and a coalition of nearly 400 local newspapers. Each case centers on a similar claim: that OpenAI trained its large language models, the systems behind tools like ChatGPT, on copyrighted news articles without licensing the material or compensating the publishers that produced it.

The cases vary in scope and the specific damages sought, but they share a common argument. Publishers say OpenAI’s commercial success depends on content it did not pay for, while OpenAI has generally maintained that training on publicly available material falls under fair use, a legal doctrine that allows limited use of copyrighted work without permission. None of the prior cases against OpenAI have yet reached a final verdict on that question, so the legal line between training data and copyright infringement remains unsettled.

Notably, the Trump administration has signaled support for OpenAI in the separate New York Times case, an indication that the policy debate over AI training data extends beyond the courtroom and into how federal officials view the companies building these systems.

The USA Today Co. lawsuit does not specify exactly how the $250 million figure was calculated, and the complaint as described does not detail which specific OpenAI products the articles allegedly trained. Those specifics, along with OpenAI’s formal response, are not yet available.

What happens next depends largely on how courts handle the earlier-filed cases, particularly The New York Times lawsuit, since any ruling on fair use there could shape how USA Today Co.’s claims proceed. OpenAI’s response to this specific filing, once it comes, will also clarify how the company plans to defend itself against the growing number of publishers making nearly identical allegations.