The filing
USA TODAY Co., the publisher formerly known as Gannett, sued OpenAI on Wednesday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, docket number 1:26-cv-08892. The case is captioned USA Today Co. v. OpenAI Foundation. The company is joined by several of the newspapers it owns.
The suit covers work from 19 publications. Seven have been named in reporting: USA TODAY, The Tennessean, the Detroit Free Press, The Arizona Republic, The Indianapolis Star, The Columbus Dispatch and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The publisher owns more than 200 local news organisations.
What is alleged
Two things, in substance. That OpenAI copied hundreds of thousands of articles and other material to train ChatGPT without permission. And that ChatGPT reproduces or summarises those articles in ways that stand in for a reader visiting the original site — the substitution argument that has become the centre of every one of these cases.
The complaint also pleads removal of copyright management information, the metadata that identifies who owns a work. That is a separate statutory claim, and it is the one that produces the second damages number.
The arithmetic behind $250m
The plaintiffs ask for up to $150,000 for each work they say was wilfully infringed, and up to $25,000 for each time copyright information was stripped. They are also asking the court to order the destruction of models trained on their copyrighted work.
The headline figure of more than $250m is the plaintiffs’ demand, not a finding and not an award. The court has ruled on none of it.
Where this sits
OpenAI is already defending copyright claims brought by The New York Times, The Intercept, Ziff Davis, CBC/Radio-Canada, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Merriam-Webster, The Seattle Times and a coalition of nearly 400 local newspapers. The company’s long-stated position is that training on publicly available material is fair use.
What makes this filing different is scale on the plaintiff side rather than novelty on the legal side. A publisher of more than 200 local titles suing as one entity is a different negotiating posture from a single masthead.
No response yet
OpenAI had not commented on the filing as of Friday, according to Reuters.
What to watch
Whether the case is consolidated with the other New York copyright actions against OpenAI. The Southern District already holds most of them, and how the court groups them will do more to determine the outcome than the size of any single damages demand.
