Delhi High Court refuses ANI interim injunction, holding AI training prima facie fair dealing under India's Copyright Act

What happened

On 24 July 2026, Justice Amit Bansal of the Delhi High Court refused Asian News International (ANI) Media Pvt. Ltd.'s application for an interim injunction against OpenAI OpCo LLC in ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v. OpenAI OpCo LLC, CS(COMM) 1028/2024. ANI had sued in November 2024, alleging that OpenAI used its news content without permission to train the models behind ChatGPT and that ChatGPT reproduced its work in its answers.

What the court held, at the interim stage

• The court held, on a prima facie basis, that it had jurisdiction even though OpenAI's training and storage took place outside India, because access to ANI's content began in India.
• It accepted that collecting and storing ANI's articles for training engages the reproduction right under Section 14 of the Copyright Act, 1957, so the order does not treat training as involving no copying at all.
• It held, again prima facie, that storing works to train a model falls within fair dealing for "private or personal use, including research" under Section 52(1)(a), and that the commercial character of OpenAI's business does not by itself take the use outside that exception. In assessing fairness, the court gave weight to the transformative nature of training, to the absence of evidence that ANI had lost subscribers or syndication revenue, and to the public interest in the development of AI.
• On outputs, the court found no prima facie evidence that ChatGPT memorised ANI's works or produced substantially similar reproductions. Articles ANI relied on to show copying in outputs had been published after the training cut-off dates of the relevant models, so the court found it most plausible that the answers came from retrieval of live web content, a case ANI had not pleaded.
• The court also noted, in assessing market harm and not as a legal requirement, that ANI had not used tools such as robots.txt to keep its content away from AI crawlers.

What the order did not decide

The court made clear that all findings were limited to the interim application and would have no bearing on the final outcome of the suit. India has no specific text-and-data-mining exception, and the order's reading of Section 52 remains provisional. ANI appealed, and on 15 September 2026 a Division Bench issued notice to OpenAI.

Wider context

In December 2025, a committee constituted by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade published a working paper proposing a hybrid model: a mandatory blanket licence for AI training on lawfully accessed works, with no opt-out, in exchange for a statutory right to remuneration. Separately, OpenAI told the court in an earlier order in the same suit that it had blocklisted ANI's domain, aninews.in, in October 2024, so the domain would be excluded from future training.

Limits of this item

This item reports the interim order as summarised in the Legal 500 analysis and corroborated by other lawyer analyses of the same order. The order is interim only; nothing here states how the suit will finally be decided, and no conclusion is drawn about whether any particular training use is lawful.