Encyclopedia Britannica sues OpenAI, alleges copyright infringement

Encyclopedia Britannica and its Merriam-Webster subsidiary have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in Manhattan federal court, accusing the company of misusing their reference materials to train its AI models.

The complaint, filed on Friday, alleges that OpenAI used nearly 100,000 of Britannica's articles, encyclopedia entries, and dictionary definitions to train its large language models without permission, according to a report by Reuters on the matter. The suit claims ChatGPT produces "near-verbatim" copies of Britannica's content and diverts users who would otherwise visit its websites with AI-generated summaries.

Britannica also accuses OpenAI of infringing its trademarks by implying it has permission to reproduce the material and by wrongfully citing Britannica in false AI "hallucinations." Britannica is seeking an unspecified amount of monetary damages and a court order blocking the alleged infringement.

The lawsuit is one of many high-stakes copyright cases filed against tech companies by authors and news outlets over the use of their material to train AI systems, explains the Reuters report. Britannica filed a similar lawsuit against AI startup Perplexity AI last year that remains ongoing.

As per Reuters, an OpenAI spokesperson responded to the allegation on Monday, saying: "Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use." AI companies have consistently argued that their systems make fair use of copyrighted content by transforming it into something new.