USA Today has sued OpenAI, making the publisher the newest entrant in a widening set of copyright cases against the AI lab.
The claim follows filings from the New York Times Company, Newsday, the Seattle Times and a group of other publishers, each arguing that OpenAI trained its models on their journalism without permission and built products that reproduce or substitute for it. USA Today’s complaint adds another large newsroom to the group pressing the same theory.
The cases have become a fixture of OpenAI’s legal calendar. Courts have started splitting on how to treat the training itself versus the outputs, and several disputes have edged toward licensing deals rather than rulings, with publishers trading litigation for commercial arrangements.
For news organizations the stakes are existential in the literal sense: if AI assistants answer the questions that used to drive search traffic, the referral traffic that funds reporting shrinks. Suing is one response; signing is another. USA Today has chosen to start with the courthouse.
