USA Today joins growing wave of lawsuits against OpenAI, seeks $250 million in damages

USA Today Co. and the local newspapers it owns filed suit against OpenAI on Thursday, alleging the company copied "hundreds of thousands" of articles to train its language models. According to a Reuters report, the complaint seeks more than $250 million in damages and accuses OpenAI of causing "real and ongoing harm" to the news organizations.

The filing argues that "OpenAI's commercial success rests on widespread copyright infringement." The company never sought permission to use the material, the complaint says, but instead "took" it to "build products worth hundreds of billions of dollars" — hundreds of billions, or more than a trillion shekels. The plaintiff list extends beyond USA Today itself to include The Tennessean, the Indy Star, The Columbus Dispatch, The Oklahoman and a string of other local papers.

This is not the first such action. OpenAI is already defending cases brought by the New York Times, The Intercept, Ziff Davis (owner of CNET), CBC/Radio-Canada, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Merriam-Webster, the Seattle Times and a coalition of nearly 400 local newspapers. The accumulating docket suggests a pattern: publishers large and small contend the models were built on their journalism without consent or compensation.

As of the filing date, OpenAI had not responded to a request for comment from The Verge. In the absence of an official statement, the allegations in the complaint remain unanswered publicly.