USA Today Co. sues OpenAI for over $250 million over AI training data

USA Today Co. sues OpenAI for over $250 million

USA Today Co., the publisher of the national newspaper USA Today and a chain of local titles, has sued OpenAI for more than $250 million, according to The Verge. The suit, described in an October 8 report first flagged by Reuters, was filed on Thursday and accuses OpenAI of copying "hundreds of thousands" of articles from the company's publications to train its AI models.

The publisher argues that this unlicensed copying "has done real and continuing" harm to its outlets, and the filing pulls no punches in characterising the defendant's business. "OpenAI's commercial success rests on large-scale copyright infringement," the lawsuit states, as quoted by The Verge.

The core allegations

According to the report, USA Today Co.'s central complaint is that OpenAI never asked for permission to use its journalism. Instead, the filing alleges, the company "took" the publisher's content to "build products worth hundreds of billions of dollars."

In effect, the publisher frames the case around two intertwined harms: the use of copyrighted work as training data without consent, and the commercial products — and enormous valuations — that OpenAI built on top of that material.

Which outlets are part of the suit

The case is not limited to the flagship national paper. The Tennessean, Indy Star, The Columbus Dispatch, The Oklahoman and several other local outlets owned by the company are included in the lawsuit. That gives the complaint the weight of an entire newspaper group rather than a single masthead, and helps explain the scale of the alleged copying.

OpenAI's response

The Verge reports that OpenAI did not immediately respond to its request for comment, so the company's response to the specific allegations remains to be seen.

Why it matters

As The Verge's own framing makes clear, USA Today is only the latest publisher to take OpenAI to court, and the case lands in the middle of a broader legal fight over whether AI developers can train models on copyrighted news content without paying for it. Three things make this filing notable.

The size of the claim: damages exceeding $250 million signal that a major publisher is prepared to seek serious financial consequences, not just a ruling on principle.

The breadth of the plaintiffs: by folding in local outlets such as The Tennessean and The Oklahoman, the suit represents many newsrooms at once, pushing the volume of allegedly copied work into the hundreds of thousands of articles.

The framing of the argument: the lawsuit's core assertion — that OpenAI's commercial success "rests on large-scale copyright infringement" — targets the foundation of the company's business model rather than isolated incidents of misuse.

The broader stakes are now well established. If courts side with publishers, AI companies could face substantial damages and growing pressure to strike paid licensing deals for training data. If OpenAI prevails, training on news content could end up treated as permissible. Either way, a damages claim of this size from a publisher of USA Today's scale adds significant weight to the mounting legal pressure on AI developers over how their models are built.