# USA Today sues OpenAI over copyright, seeks more than $250M

Published: 2026-10-08T18:03:35.785Z · Source: The Verge AI (https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/1008198/usa-today-openai-copyright-lawsuit)
Source date: 2026-10-08
Entities: openai, ai-litigation

USA Today Co. and 13 affiliated newspaper entities sued OpenAI on Oct. 8 in the Southern District of New York, alleging the company trained GPT models on hundreds of thousands of their articles without permission, per Forbes and Unite.AI. The complaint says the papers' content appears more than 160,000 times in WebText, the dataset behind GPT-2, and that a 2019 Common Crawl snapshot used to train later models pulled 23 million tokens from usatoday.com alone. Beyond copyright and vicarious-infringement claims, the suit adds a DMCA count over stripped authorship credits, seeks more than $250 million including up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work, and asks the court to fold the case into OpenAI's existing consolidated copyright litigation.

Why it matters: It's the fifth publisher-vs-OpenAI copyright suit on this record since mid-August, and the request to fold the case into OpenAI's existing consolidated MDL shows publishers increasingly litigating as a bloc rather than seeking individual leverage.

## What this answers

**Is USA Today suing OpenAI?**

Yes — USA Today Co. and 13 affiliated newspaper entities filed suit against OpenAI on Oct. 8, 2026 in the Southern District of New York, alleging their articles were used without permission to train GPT models.

**How much is USA Today seeking from OpenAI?**

The complaint seeks more than $250 million, including statutory damages of up to $150,000 for each work OpenAI is found to have willfully infringed.


Canonical: https://anythingengineoptimization.com/item/2026-10-08-usa-today-sues-openai-over-copyright-seeks-more-than-250m/
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