Indian agency sues OpenAI over copyright violation

By Ahmad Adil

NEW DELHI (AA) - One of India’s largest news agencies has sued OpenAI, accusing the company of unauthorized use of its original news content.

Asian News International (ANI) filed a copyright infringement suit before the Delhi high court, which heard the matter on Tuesday.

The court, while issuing notice to OpenAI, noted that “an amicus curiae be appointed to assist the court in this case.”

Siddhant Kumar, the counsel for ANI, said, “ChatGPT uses the news agency's content to train OpenAI's large-language model (LLM), enabling the chatbot to provide responses to user queries,” Indian legal news website Live Law reported.

ANI claims that its original news content is being “exploited for commercial gain” by OpenAI.

Kumar further stated, “The use of ANI's copyrighted material for training ChatGPT's LLM, storing the news agency's content, and creating copies of the same amounts to copyright infringement.”

The court has scheduled the next hearing for January 2025.

Amit Sibal, appearing for OpenAI, raised a “preliminary objection on territorial jurisdiction,” arguing that “since OpenAI has no servers in India, no cause of action against ChatGPT arises in India.”

OpenAI is a US-based artificial intelligence research and deployment company, best known for developing ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that generates human-like responses to user queries.