Delhi High Court Gives OpenAI Interim Win Over ANI Copyright Suit

The Delhi High Court, presided over by Judge Amit Bansal, rejected a request by Asian News International (ANI), one of India's largest news agencies, for a preliminary injunction against OpenAI. ANI alleged that OpenAI's ChatGPT models infringed its copyrights by reproducing articles during AI training and in generated outputs.

The court found that the GPT‑4 and GPT‑4o models were trained on data up to April 2022 and April 2024, while ANI's cited articles dated from August and September 2024 could not have been part of the training set. Similarities in the outputs were attributed to Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), a technique that pulls real‑time information from the internet. The judge ruled that facts in news articles are not subject to copyright, no verbatim copies were shown, and adversarial prompts used by ANI did not prove infringement. While the interim ruling favours OpenAI, the court indicated the main proceedings will address whether RAG‑based outputs constitute a public communication.