Published: October 17, 2026 · Last updated: October 17, 2026
Gannett, the parent company of USA Today, is suing OpenAI for more than $250 million, accusing it of training ChatGPT on 19 of its publications without permission or payment.
Gannett, the company behind USA Today and dozens of local newspapers across the country, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI this week seeking more than $250 million in damages, becoming the latest and one of the largest news publishers to take the fight over AI training data straight to federal court.
The complaint accuses OpenAI of training ChatGPT on content pulled from 19 of Gannett’s publications without a license or compensation, then using that training to build a product that competes directly with the same journalism it was trained on by answering reader questions ChatGPT would otherwise have sent to Gannett’s own sites. That is the same core argument The New York Times made in its own lawsuit against OpenAI nearly two years ago, and the same one a growing list of other publishers have since joined or filed independently.
What makes Gannett’s case distinct is scale. Nineteen publications under one filing covers a meaningful slice of local and regional news coverage across the country, in markets that, in many cases, no longer have more than one working newsroom covering them at all. Gannett’s argument leans on that specifically, that AI systems trained on local reporting, without paying for it, are accelerating the same economic pressure that has already closed newspapers in dozens of American communities, while the companies doing the training capture the commercial upside.
OpenAI has consistently argued, in this case and in the others preceding it, that training on publicly available web content falls under fair use, and that its products drive readers back to original sources rather than simply replacing them. That argument has had mixed results across the handful of AI copyright cases that have reached substantive rulings so far, with outcomes varying enough by jurisdiction and specific facts that no single precedent yet controls how courts will treat the broader question.
The lawsuit lands at an odd moment for the news industry’s relationship with AI companies more broadly, since plenty of publishers have simultaneously been signing paid licensing deals with the same companies they or their peers are suing. Google, OpenAI, and others have inked content partnerships with major outlets even as lawsuits proceed against them from different publishers, which suggests the industry has not settled on a unified strategy so much as different companies betting on different approaches to the same unresolved problem at the same time.
For publishers watching from the sidelines, the Gannett suit is one more data point in an unresolved legal question that will likely take years and multiple appellate rulings to settle definitively. In the meantime, every publisher is left making its own bet: sue, license, or wait and see which approach the courts eventually validate.
Related: Google’s own publisher relationship is under similar strain over AI search traffic and what OpenAI is building next while this lawsuit plays out.
Bottom Line: A $250 million lawsuit will not resolve the AI copyright question on its own, but it adds real financial weight to a fight that has mostly been argued in principle until now. Publishers suing and publishers licensing are both placing the same bet from opposite directions, and only time will say which side guessed right.
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