USA TODAY Co. sues OpenAI for over $250 million over copyright infringement

USA TODAY Co. and its affiliated newspapers, managed by Gannett, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs are seeking damages exceeding $250 million, alleging that OpenAI used hundreds of thousands of their journalistic works to train GPT models without authorization.

The complaint includes counts of copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, and the removal of copyright management information under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Specifically, the plaintiffs allege that their content comprises more than 160,000 entries in OpenAI’s WebText dataset and over 122 million tokens in the C4 dataset.

Beyond monetary damages, the lawsuit seeks remedies that include the destruction of models trained on the plaintiffs’ content. This legal action follows similar litigation from other entities such as The New York Times and CBC/Radio-Canada, though USA TODAY Co. is notable for specifying a concrete damage amount.