USA Today Publishers Sue OpenAI for More Than $250 Million

USA Today Co. and publishers representing 19 publications sued OpenAI in federal court on Oct. 8, seeking more than $250 million over allegations that the company used their journalism to train AI models and reproduced it in chatbot responses.

The publishers are asking the court to bar the alleged conduct and order the destruction of models and training datasets they say include their copyrighted material. The group includes publishers of USA TODAY, The Tennessean, the Detroit Free Press and The Arizona Republic.

The filing says OpenAI’s WebText corpus included more than 160,000 entries from domains operated by the publishers. That figure includes 83,266 entries from usatoday.com and 12,994 from freep.com.

The publishers assert direct and vicarious copyright-infringement claims and accuse OpenAI of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by removing copyright-management information. The complaint also alleges that OpenAI’s models reproduced or repackaged news articles in ways that could substitute for the publishers’ original reporting.

The case joins a broader wave of disputes between news publishers and AI companies over the use of journalism in model training and chatbot outputs. The complaint cites OpenAI’s licensing agreements with other media organizations as evidence that copyrighted news content had commercial value.

The court will have to consider whether copying articles for AI training qualifies as fair use and whether chatbot summaries or reproduced passages infringe publishers’ rights. The case also raises whether removing copyright-management information creates separate liability.

The plaintiffs’ allegations have not been established by a court, and the lawsuit does not determine whether OpenAI is liable.