Delhi High Court declines interim injunction against OpenAI in ANI copyright suit

What happened

The Delhi High Court declined Indian news agency ANI's request for an interim injunction that would have stopped OpenAI from using ANI's content while the broader copyright case continues. ANI sued OpenAI in November 2024, accusing the company of using its copyrighted reports without permission to train AI models and alleging ChatGPT produced fabricated stories attributed to the agency. Justice Amit Bansal found ANI had not shown evidence that ChatGPT had memorized or reproduced its news reports in responses to users, and took the prima facie view that storing ANI's articles for training falls under Section 52(1)(a) of India's Copyright Act (fair dealing for research).

Why it may matter to you

This is reported as the first major Indian court decision examining whether AI companies can train large language models on copyrighted news content without a license. A research/fair-dealing framing for training-data storage, if it holds, would give AI developers legal support for using publicly available copyrighted material for model training in India — and would narrow one avenue for news publishers seeking to block training use there.

What is not yet known

This is not a final judgment. ANI has appealed the refusal of the interim injunction: a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court (Justices Avneesh Jhingan and Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora) issued notice on the appeal on 15 September 2026 and listed it for further hearing in December, so the question is not closed. The court also found that ChatGPT outputs created through retrieval-augmented generation were not substantially similar to ANI's original content — a finding tied to the evidence in this case, not a general rule about AI outputs.