Delhi HC denies ANI interim relief against OpenAI in ChatGPT copyright case

The Delhi High Court has reportedly refused to grant interim relief to Asian News International (ANI), holding that OpenAI's use of ANI's news content for training ChatGPT does not, at this stage, constitute copyright infringement.

According to media reports, in its interim order issued on Friday, the court observed that using copyrighted material to train a Large Language Model (LLM) is protected under the fair dealing exception provided in Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act. As a result, it said, such use does not attract liability under Section 51 for copyright infringement.

The Bench also reporetdly examined responses generated by ChatGPT through its Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system and found that they were not substantially similar to ANI's original reports. It concluded that the AI-generated outputs did not infringe ANI's copyright.

The court further noted that ANI had not been able to demonstrate that ChatGPT had memorised or reproduced its copyrighted literary works in the responses produced by the chatbot.

Consequently, the court declined to prohibit OpenAI from using ANI's published content. It also held that issuing an interim injunction at this stage could cause irreparable harm not only to OpenAI but also to the broader public interest.

Rejecting ANI's plea for interim relief, the Bench said the news agency had failed to establish a prima facie case and that the balance of convenience weighed against granting an injunction.

ANI has alleged that OpenAI used its copyrighted news articles without authorisation or licensing fees while training ChatGPT. According to the news agency, OpenAI deployed web crawlers to scrape content available on its website and incorporated the material into its training datasets. ANI further contended that responses generated by ChatGPT sometimes reproduced its articles, including content available only to subscribers.

The news agency argued that such use falls outside the “fair dealing” exemption under Section 52 of the Copyright Act, asserting that ChatGPT operates as a commercial product and that the use of journalistic works for AI training constitutes infringement. ANI maintained that infringement occurs at the ingestion stage itself, when copyrighted content is scraped, stored, and processed during model training.

OpenAI challenged the maintainability of the suit as well as the allegation of infringement. The company argued that neither it nor its servers are based in India, raising questions regarding the jurisdiction of Indian courts. It further submitted that the model is trained on publicly available material and learns statistical relationships between words rather than storing or reproducing expressive content.

The company also contended that ANI had not demonstrated instances of verbatim reproduction in ChatGPT outputs. OpenAI stated that the training process extracts what it characterised as “non-expressive” features of text, which it argued fall outside the scope of copyright protection. During the course of proceedings, OpenAI informed the Court that it had blocked ANI’s domain from future training.

The dispute expanded into a broader industry debate, with six intervenors participating in the proceedings. Organisations including the Digital News Publishers Association, Indian Music Industry, and the Federation of Indian Publishers supported ANI’s position, arguing that AI training processes such as scraping and tokenisation involve copying and transforming protected expressions.