USA Today becomes the latest publisher to sue OpenAI

USA Today Co., along with several local newspapers it owns, has sued OpenAI, alleging the company copied hundreds of thousands of its articles to train AI models. The filing, first reported by Reuters and covered by The Verge, seeks damages of more than $250 million and claims the unauthorized use has caused real and continuing harm to its outlets.

The suit names local papers including The Tennessean, IndyStar, The Columbus Dispatch and The Oklahoman. It argues OpenAI never asked permission and instead took the content to build products worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

It joins a long list. OpenAI already faces copyright cases from 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.

We will say up front where we sit. We are a publication, and we also believe AI tools that help people find and understand information are genuinely useful. Both things can be true. What cannot hold for long is a system where the reporting that makes those tools valuable is taken without permission or payment while the outlets producing it shrink.

The local angle is what stands out to us. The New York Times can afford a long legal fight. A city paper in Oklahoma or Ohio generally cannot do it alone, which is why these cases now come bundled through parent companies and coalitions. When the plaintiffs are local papers, the harm being described is not abstract. It is fewer reporters covering city councils, courts and schools.

OpenAI has defended its training as fair use in earlier publisher cases, and that question is still being fought out. We are not going to predict how it lands. But the volume of suits matters on its own. Each new filing raises the legal and reputational cost of the take-first approach, and makes licensing look cheaper by comparison.

Here is where this leads if it scales without resolution. Either AI companies settle into paying for news at a meaningful rate, which could become a real revenue line for struggling outlets, or the cases drag on for years while local newsrooms keep closing, and the eventual remedy arrives too late for many of them. The second path is the one we fear.

Our read: the pile-up is pushing toward a licensing market, and that is the right destination. I'm watching whether OpenAI responds with deals rather than motions, and whether any court ruling sets a standard that local publishers can actually use.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to The Verge's request for comment. The company has struck licensing deals with some publishers while fighting suits from others, so the line between partner and plaintiff in the news industry is shifting case by case.