USA Today Co. and corporate owners of 18 affiliated newspapers have sued OpenAI in Manhattan federal court, alleging that the company copied protected journalism to train and operate its artificial-intelligence systems.
The complaint, filed Thursday in the Southern District of New York, names seven OpenAI entities and identifies publications including The Tennessean, The Indianapolis Star, The Columbus Dispatch and The Oklahoman. The plaintiffs say hundreds of thousands of articles were taken without permission and that model outputs can reproduce or closely track protected expression while omitting copyright-management information.
The lawsuit pleads direct and vicarious copyright infringement as well as a claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It seeks damages, injunctive relief and other remedies, including more than $250 million according to the filing. Those figures and factual assertions are demands and allegations, not judicial findings.
The case is USA Today Co. Inc. v. OpenAI Foundation, No. 1:26-cv-08892. OpenAI had not filed a response at the time of publication. The action joins a broader set of cases testing when the use of published material in model development is licensed, protected as fair use, or infringing.
