Topline
USA Today’s parent company and 13 of its entities sued OpenAI in New York on Thursday, accusing it of illegally copying hundreds of thousands of articles from 19 publications to train and operate its models, and then reproduce or repackage that reporting for ChatGPT users.
JINAN, CHINA – NOVEMBER 13: In this photo illustration, the logo of ChatGPT is displayed on a smartphone screen with an OpenAI logo in the background on November 13, 2025 in Jinan, Shandong Province of China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
VCG via Getty Images
Key Facts
USA Today Co., Inc. and 13 affiliated entities are seeking more than $250 million in damages from OpenAI, including up to $150,000 for each willfully infringed work and up to $25,000 for every time OpenAI stripped copyright information, according to the complaint, which was filed in New York federal court on Thursday.
The lawsuit claims its papers make up over 160,000 entries in WebText, which is a dataset OpenAI built to train its GPT-2 model, and over 122 million tokens in a 2019 snapshot of Common Crawl called C4, including 23 million tokens from usatoday.com.
The filing provides examples where GPT-5.6 retrieved articles from outlets like the Indianapolis Star and Detroit Free Press and produced in-depth summaries when prompted with paraphrasing and similar structure.
The plaintiffs are accusing OpenAI of willful infringement, saying its involvement in training the models means it “knew or should have known” that the models were, without permission, copying content “on a massive scale during training,” ultimately leading to encoding works and then displaying them to users in search results, and adding that its paid agreements with other news organizations proves it knows they require a license.
The lawsuit claims OpenAI’s unlawful conduct has and continues to cause substantial financial harm to the publications that rely on readers visiting their sites and paying for their content to fund the hundreds of millions of dollars they invest in reporting.
The lawsuit also asks for a court order to destroy GPT models and training sets that use content from the 19 publications involved, and a jury trial.
KEY BACKGROUND
The USA Today plaintiffs own the copyright for content published by USA TODAY, The Tennessean, Indy Star, The Bergen Record, The Enquirer, Asbury Park Press, Democrat & Chronicle, The Knoxville News-Sentinel, Naples Daily News, The Oklahoman, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Columbus Dispatch, The Arizona Republic, The Courier-Journal, The Des Moines Register, Detroit Free Press, The Detroit News, The Palm Beach Post and Star News. The filing represents the latest development in the fight between publishers and AI companies over copyrighted material, with many consolidated in New York. Publications and media outlets have filed complaints, including The New York Times, who sued both the AI company and Microsoft in December 2023 for alleged copyright infringement, trademark issues, misappropriation and false attribution as a result of using its reporting to train models like ChatGPT. Thursday’s filing makes claims about OpenAI unlawfully using its content to train ChatGPT, but also tackles the issue of the company reproducing or repackaging the work, which the plaintiffs claim brings down viewership for the publications.
TANGENT
In Thursday’s filing, the plaintiffs cite a quote from OpenAI’s Head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, who “wrote that publishers face an ‘existential threat’ from OpenAI’s products and that they ‘are largely substitutive, period’ and ‘will get more and more substitutive as they get better.’” The filing also states that an OpenAI software engineer wrote that “no matter how prominently we show the links, users won’t click,” and referenced other quotes, including internal OpenAI documents that reportedly claim ChatGPT is the “modern newsstand” that will prevent people from needing to use a search engine. The plaintiffs say these quotes show, in OpenAI’s own words, how ChatGPT harms the publications financially, making it harder to attract and retain paying customers and licensing agreements with other publishers.
CRUCIAL QUOTE
“OpenAI deliberately chose to use copyrighted works without permission, disregarding the rights of authors and publishers whose livelihoods depend on respect for their creative efforts. OpenAI did not merely steal the copyrighted works used to train its models; it did so using programs designed to strip away Copyright Management Information (“CMI”), which indicated that the works were protected by valid copyrights,” the filing reads.
FURTHER READING
New York Times Sues OpenAI And Microsoft: ‘Billions’ Owed For AI Copyright Infringement, Case Claims (Forbes)
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