The Delhi High Court on Friday (July 24, 2026) refused to grant interim relief to news agency Asian News International (ANI) in its copyright infringement suit against OpenAI, holding prima facie that the company’s use of ANI’s works for training ChatGPT falls within the exception under Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act.

Justice Amit Bansal said OpenAI’s act of storing ANI’s literary works for training its Large Language Models (LLMs), prima facie, did not amount to copyright infringement.

The Court also held that responses generated by ChatGPT using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) were not substantially similar to ANI’s original works and therefore did not infringe copyright.

The Court further observed that restraining OpenAI at this stage would cause irreparable injury not only to the company but also to the public at large.

The suit, filed by ANI in November 2024, is the first copyright action by an Indian news organisation against OpenAI.

ANI alleged that OpenAI had used its copyrighted news reports without permission to train ChatGPT and that the chatbot generated responses which copied or closely summarised its reports. It also claimed that ChatGPT falsely attributed fabricated news reports and statements to ANI, harming its reputation.

ANI, on October 3, 2024, offered to grant a license to OpenAI for using the news contents for the training of the LLM. However, the US-based company declined this proposal.

ANI’s counsel had, during the hearing, stated it is publicly known that OpenAI have entered into strategic partnerships and licensing arrangements with news organisations such as the Financial Times, Associated Press, and Conde Nast that function on a similar business model as ANI.

OpenAI has denied the allegations, maintaining that ANI’s website had been excluded from future training and that ChatGPT did not unlawfully reproduce ANI’s works.