Indian court says OpenAI did not violate news agency ANI's copyright
FILE PHOTO: The OpenAI logo in this illustration taken June 11, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
BENGALURU, July 24 : An Indian court said on Friday that OpenAI's use of news agency ANI's content to train its ChatGPT service did not amount to copyright infringement.
The remarks are the first substantive court finding in India on whether AI companies can train large language models on copyrighted news content without a licence, a question being litigated in similar suits against OpenAI in the United States and Canada.
ANI sued OpenAI in the Delhi High Court in November 2024, accusing the U.S. company of using its published content without permission to train its AI models and of having its chatbot attribute fabricated stories to the news agency.
ANI had failed to show that ChatGPT memorised or reproduced its news reports in responses generated for users, Justice Amit Bansal of the Delhi court said on Friday.
OpenAI's storage of ANI's news articles to train the models underlying ChatGPT is protected by a fair-dealing exemption for research under a provision of India's Copyright Act and therefore does not infringe ANI's copyright, Bansal said.
