On October 8, 2026, USA TODAY Co., Inc. and 13 affiliated companies, all owned by it, filed a 79-page complaint against OpenAI in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York (case 1:26-cv-08892). The plaintiffs own the copyrights in 19 publications, including USA TODAY, The Tennessean, Detroit Free Press, The Arizona Republic, The Des Moines Register, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and The Columbus Dispatch. The defendants are seven OpenAI entities, from OpenAI Foundation to OpenAI Group PBC. Microsoft is not named.
The complaint pleads three counts: direct copyright infringement, vicarious infringement, and removal of copyright management information under the DMCA (17 U.S.C. 1202). It alleges OpenAI’s models copied “hundreds of thousands of articles” and seeks damages “in excess of $250 million”, citing statutory damages of up to $150,000 per willfully infringed work plus up to $25,000 per CMI violation. It also asks for an injunction and for destruction under 17 U.S.C. 503(b) of all GPT or other models and training sets that include the plaintiffs’ content.
The filing leans on discovery from the consolidated OpenAI copyright litigation in the same court, quoting internal OpenAI messages that GPT-4 would have “memorized a ton of data” and a Microsoft executive calling OpenAI’s output filters an “accidental cover up” because they suppressed only content from parties that had sued. The plaintiffs say they “join the long list of copyright holders” suing OpenAI, many of whose cases have been consolidated in that court.
Why it matters: one of the largest US local news chains has joined the New York Times and other publishers in litigation rather than licensing, and it is using evidence produced in the earlier cases to argue willfulness. Each new publisher suit raises OpenAI’s potential statutory damages exposure.
What it does not show: these are allegations, and no court has ruled on them. The damages figure is the plaintiffs’ demand, and whether the case is folded into the consolidated litigation was not decided at filing.