WikiHow sues OpenAI over alleged use of 11,211 copyrighted how-to articles in ChatGPT training

What happened

On Aug. 21, 2026, wikiHow, Inc. filed a copyright and DMCA complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (No. 1:26-cv-07171) against OpenAI and eight affiliated entities.

What the complaint alleges

wikiHow alleges OpenAI copied 11,211 of its how-to articles -- covered by more than 1,200 registered copyrights -- without permission, whether by crawling and scraping its websites directly or through intermediary datasets such as Common Crawl, WebText and WebText2. The complaint says OpenAI's crawlers reached wikiHow's articles more than 185,000 times between March and May 2025 and 148,529 times between May and July 2026. It further alleges OpenAI retrieves wikiHow articles through retrieval-augmented generation systems and that ChatGPT outputs reproduce wikiHow's expression, depriving wikiHow of the page visits on which its advertising revenue depends. These are allegations in a complaint; nothing has been decided.

OpenAI's position

An OpenAI spokesperson said its models are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use.

Relief sought

Unspecified damages, an injunction against further infringement, and attorneys' fees.