USA Today and publishers representing 19 newspapers seeking more than $250 million from OpenAI

USA Today and publishers representing 19 newspapers are seeking more than $250 million from OpenAI and a court order to destroy AI models and training datasets allegedly containing their copyrighted journalism, reports Law Commentary.

The lawsuit, continues the post, “accuses the company behind ChatGPT of copying hundreds of thousands of news articles without permission to train its artificial intelligence systems and reproducing protected reporting through its chatbot.

“Filed October 8, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the case names seven OpenAI entities as defendants. USA Today Co. and 13 affiliated companies brought the action over content published by newspapers including The Arizona Republic, Detroit Free Press, The Tennessean, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Indianapolis Star.

“The 79-page complaint identifies more than 160,000 entries from the newspapers’ websites in OpenAI’s WebText training dataset, including approximately 83,300 associated with USA Today’s flagship website. The publications allege that OpenAI collected articles regardless of paywalls and other access restrictions, citing internal company communications they say show that OpenAI deliberately targeted news content while developing technology capable of reproducing it.”