USA Today Publisher Sues OpenAI, Seeking More Than $250 Million Over AI Training
Another major news publisher has taken OpenAI to court. On 8 October 2026, USA Today Co. and several local newspapers it owns filed a copyright suit against OpenAI in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (case 1:2026cv08892), according to the court docket and reporting by The Verge.
The publishers claim that OpenAI copied "hundreds of thousands" of their articles to train its AI models without permission, and they seek damages of more than $250 million. Titles named in the suit include The Tennessean, IndyStar, The Columbus Dispatch and The Oklahoman, The Verge reports. OpenAI had not commented when the report was published. These are allegations; the court has made no findings.
Part of a growing list
The Verge notes that OpenAI already faces suits 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. Each case is decided on its own facts, but together they will shape how U.S. courts treat news content used for AI training.
The legal questions
Claims like these usually turn on two issues: whether copying for training is infringing at all, and whether a fair-use defence applies. Recent U.S. decisions point in different directions. In Thomson Reuters v. Ross, which we covered earlier, the Third Circuit rejected fair use where protected material was used to build a competing product. Other courts have been more open to fair-use arguments on different facts. A newspaper's argument often focuses on market substitution, meaning that AI outputs may replace visits to the original article.
What it means for Indonesia
Indonesia's Copyright Law No. 28 of 2014 has no general fair-use clause; it lists specific exceptions instead. We are not aware of an Indonesian court decision on AI training with copyrighted news. Indonesian publishers and AI developers should keep clear records of licences, crawling permissions and data sources, because these documents tend to decide such disputes wherever they arise.
Sources
Do you or your clients need trademark, patent, annuity or industrial design work in Indonesia? We handle filings, prosecution and renewals, with updates in English. Email us for a quote.
Contact UsIf you enjoyed this article on our portal, you can buy me a coffee via the PayPal link below.
PayPal
