Publisher Copyright Litigation Wave: USA Today Sues OpenAI for $250M as Local News Joins the Fray

Publisher Copyright Litigation Wave: USA Today Sues OpenAI for $250M as Local News Joins the Fray

On October 9, 2026, USA Today Co became the latest news publisher to sue OpenAI: "USA Today Co has sued OpenAI for the unauthorised use of hundreds of thousands of articles across its 19 publications, seeking $250m in damages¹" (Press Gazette). The complaint alleges the WebText dataset built to train GPT-2 included more than 160,000 entries from its newsbrands — 83,266 from USA Today itself — and that a 2019 Common Crawl snapshot used to train GPT-3 contained more than 122 million tokens from USA Today Co publications. The publisher's words: "OpenAI never asked permission. It never offered payment. It simply took the USA Today plaintiffs' work and used it to build products worth hundreds of billions of dollars." It also alleges the GPT LLMs "memorised" copies of its work and produce "near-verbatim copies and summaries" when prompted. Local titles cited include The Tennessean, Indy Star, Detroit Free Press and The Des Moines Register.

The suit caps a heavy 2026 filing season across the publisher-vs-AI docket:

• Seattle Times and Newsday v. OpenAI and Microsoft (Sept 7, 2026): Seattle Times president and CEO Alan Fisco — "we feel strongly that we must defend our content — which we spend millions of dollars a year to produce — from being used without our consent or compensation." The complaint: "there is nothing transformative about copying The Seattle Times' and Newsday's journalism, without payment, to build products that compete directly with Plaintiffs for the same readers, the same advertisers, and the same subscription dollars."
• Wikihow v. OpenAI (Aug 22, 2026): "the unlicensed taking of a publisher's written work to build a product that competes with it."
• 30+ US local newspaper owners v. OpenAI and Microsoft (June 26, 2026): roughly 400 titles, alleging "systematic and willful theft of hundreds of thousands of copyrighted articles."
• Reddit v. Anthropic: in September 2026 a judge allowed most of Reddit's suit to proceed — on breach of contract, interference with contract, and California's unfair competition law.
• CNN v. Perplexity (May 29, 2026), News Corp v. Brave (July 22, 2026), and Penske v. Google over AI Overviews (Sept 2025) round out the front.

The settlement/licensing track runs in parallel: Folha dropped its suit for a commercial agreement (May 2026), and OpenAI signed deals with India's two largest newspaper groups (Sept 23, 2026 — reportedly ~$5M/yr for Bennett Coleman, ~$3M/yr for Indian Express). The pattern: sue-and-settle or sue-and-license for some; escalating damages claims for others ($250M from USA Today; the nine Alden Global Capital newspapers sought $10B+ in Nov 2025).