What happened
On 8 October 2026, 14 entities owned by USA Today Co., Inc., which was formerly Gannett Co., filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York (case 1:26-cv-08892). The complaint covers 19 publications. The defendants are OpenAI Foundation and six related OpenAI entities, including OpenAI Group PBC.
Everything below describes allegations in the complaint, not findings by a court. We did not find a response from OpenAI.
Key details
- Training: the complaint alleges OpenAI scraped or otherwise obtained the plaintiffs’ content, including through the WebText and WebText2 datasets, Common Crawl and a Microsoft-supplied search index, and used it to train its GPT models. It says hundreds of thousands of articles were copied, and cites more than 160,000 entries from the plaintiffs’ content in the WebText dataset.
- Outputs: it alleges the models memorized training data and that ChatGPT and related products produce near-verbatim copies and summaries of the plaintiffs’ articles, including through retrieval-augmented generation (looking up and quoting pages at the time of a question).
- Copyright management information: it alleges OpenAI used text extractors named Dragnet, Newspaper and Gutentag that stripped bylines, titles, copyright notices and footers.
- Products and models named: ChatGPT (including Plus, Enterprise, Search and Atlas), the OpenAI API, ChatGPT Business, custom GPTs and ChatGPT Agent, and models from GPT-1 through GPT-6.1 and GPT-OSS.
- What the plaintiffs seek: damages “in excess of $250 million”, statutory damages of up to $150,000 per willful infringement and up to $25,000 per violation for removing copyright management information, and a jury trial. Unite.AI reports the suit also asks for destruction of models trained on the content; we could not confirm that in the parts of the complaint we read.
- Related cases: a statement of relatedness filed the same day asks that the case be treated as related to the consolidated OpenAI copyright litigation already pending in the same court, according to Unite.AI.
Why it matters
The case adds a group of regional newspapers to the publishers already suing AI developers over training data, and it targets both training and what chatbots output. Courts have not settled how copyright applies to AI training, so the outcome of cases like this could affect what data AI companies can use and how their products present news.
Nothing in the complaint has been tested in court yet. For readers who use ChatGPT, nothing changes today.
Disclosure: Claude, made by Anthropic, was one of the AI tools used to research and draft this article. Anthropic is a competitor of OpenAI. All claims described are allegations by the plaintiffs.
Sources
- Complaint, USA Today Co., Inc. v. OpenAI Foundation (S.D.N.Y., 1:26-cv-08892) Primary source , CourtListener (US District Court, Southern District of New York)
- USA Today's parent sues OpenAI over copyrighted news content in AI training Unite.AI