Delhi HC declines interim injunction against OpenAI in ANI copyright case

The Delhi High Court has handed OpenAI a significant interim victory in India’s first major copyright lawsuit against an AI company, declining to restrain ChatGPT from using content published by Asian News International (ANI).

The ruling is important because it offers the court’s first detailed view on whether using copyrighted material to train AI models may be permissible under Indian copyright law, even though the case itself is far from over.

In an interim order, Justice Amit Bansal held that OpenAI’s storage of ANI’s news content for training its large language model (LLM) is prima facie protected by the fair dealing exception under Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act and therefore does not constitute infringement under Section 51.

The Court also found that responses generated by ChatGPT, including through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a technique that retrieves relevant information before generating an answer, were not substantially similar to ANI’s original reporting.

The Court said ANI had not demonstrated that ChatGPT had memorised or reproduced its copyrighted works.

The Court, however, ruled in ANI’s favour on territorial jurisdiction, holding that Indian courts can hear the dispute despite OpenAI’s servers being located in the United States. That means the underlying copyright claims will proceed to trial.

ANI, which filed the suit in 2024, alleged that OpenAI used its copyrighted news reports without permission to train ChatGPT, reproduced its content in response to user prompts, and generated false statements wrongly attributed to the news agency, potentially damaging its reputation.

OpenAI argued that copyright does not extend to facts themselves, that its models are trained on publicly available information, and that publishers can opt out of future web crawling.

The dispute forms part of a much broader global debate over AI training and copyright.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and other AI developers are facing lawsuits from publishers, authors and other rights holders in multiple jurisdictions over whether copyrighted material can be used to train AI systems without a licence.

Meanwhile, governments including the UK are consulting on how copyright law should apply to AI, while the European Union has introduced transparency requirements for general-purpose AI models under its AI Act.

The Delhi High Court’s interim order is likely to be closely watched as India develops its own legal approach to AI and copyright.