An Indian court has delivered a landmark ruling that could shape the future of AI training data law, finding that OpenAI's use of news articles to train its ChatGPT service did not violate copyright law.
Justice Amit Bansal of the Delhi High Court ruled on Friday that ANI, the Indian news agency that sued OpenAI in November 2024, had failed to show that ChatGPT memorized or reproduced its news reports in responses generated for users.
The court further held that 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.
This is the first substantive court finding in India on whether AI companies can train large language models on copyrighted news content without a license — a question being litigated in similar lawsuits against OpenAI in the United States and Canada.
The ruling comes at a critical time for the AI industry, which faces mounting legal challenges worldwide over the use of copyrighted material for training. While US and European courts are still weighing similar cases, India's position may influence how the global debate unfolds.
ANI had accused OpenAI of using its published content without permission to train its AI models and alleged that ChatGPT had attributed fabricated stories to the news agency. The court found neither claim constituted infringement under Indian law.
