OpenAI has denied claims from several Indian media companies that it used their content without permission to train ChatGPT. The claims are part of a copyright lawsuit initially filed by the news agency ANI. According to a report by Reuters, OpenAI is also trying to prevent major Indian media groups – including news outlets owned by business tycoons like Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani – from joining the lawsuit.
Media organizations such as NDTV, Network 18, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, and the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) have accused OpenAI of scraping (automatically collecting) their news content without their consent. Last month, these media outlets filed a petition in the Delhi High Court to join an ongoing lawsuit against the ChatGPT maker.
But now, in its 31-page legal filing, reportedly dated February 11, OpenAI argues that there is no legal obligation to enter into partnership agreements with media groups to use publicly available content. OpenAI has denied all allegations, stating that it has not used content from ANI, other media applicants, or members of the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) to train its AI models.
Notably, ANI (a prominent Indian news agency) filed a lawsuit in November 2024, claiming that ChatGPT uses its published content without permission to train its AI chatbot. At that time, a spokesperson for OpenAI said, “We build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner protected by fair use and related principles, and supported by long-standing and widely accepted legal precedents.”
Meanwhile, in December 2024, the Federation of Indian Publishers (FIP) also filed a petition, demanding that OpenAI immediately cease accessing their copyrighted works, such as books and online content. FIP represents some prominent publishers, including Bloomsbury, Penguin Random House, Cambridge University Press, Pan Macmillan, Rupa Publications, and S. Chand and Co. In its petition, the plaintiffs stated that either the company agrees to or negotiates licensing agreements or deletes the datasets used in AI model training.
A copyright violation lawsuit is not a new thing for AI giants like OpenAI. Earlier in 2023, The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI for copyright infringement, alleging that they used its content to train LLM models without consent. Even after a month of the NYT case, nonfiction authors Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage also filed a class-action lawsuit against both companies for illegally using their copyrighted works. In 2023, social media giant Meta also faced a copyright infringement lawsuit from a group of authors, alleging that the company used pirated content to train its LLaMA AI models with permission from its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
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