The Verge reported on 8 October that USA Today Co. is suing OpenAI. Several local newspapers that the company owns are also part of the suit. They include The Tennessean, Indy Star, The Columbus Dispatch and The Oklahoman. The Verge said Reuters had reported the story earlier. According to The Verge, the filing came on Thursday. It says OpenAI copied hundreds of thousands of articles to train its AI models. The publisher asks for more than $250 million in damages.
These are the publisher's claims, and no court has ruled on them. The Verge says the suit states that OpenAI never asked for permission. It also says the suit accuses OpenAI of building products worth hundreds of billions of dollars from this content. OpenAI had not answered The Verge's request for comment when the story ran. The Verge's article does not say which court has the case or when a hearing might happen. It calls this the latest of many such suits. Others come from The New York Times, The Intercept, Ziff Davis, Encyclopaedia Britannica and a group of nearly 400 local papers.
Teams that build on OpenAI's models, or buy tools that use them, depend on a company facing many copyright claims. These suits are about how AI models get trained on published work. Buyers may want to ask vendors where their training data came from.