Delhi High Court Rejects ANI Copyright Injunction Against OpenAI

The Delhi High Court rejected Asian News International’s request for a preliminary injunction against OpenAI in an interim ruling. ANI had sued over OpenAI’s use of copyrighted material in AI training and ChatGPT outputs, but Judge Amit Bansal denied the requested relief on both claims.

The main trial is still pending, so the ruling does not end the dispute. For now, it gives OpenAI a significant procedural win in one of the closely watched AI copyright fights involving news content.

ANI submitted ChatGPT outputs it said were substantial copies of its articles, but OpenAI showed that GPT-4 and GPT-4o were trained on data from April 2022 and April 2024. The cited ANI articles were mostly from August and September 2024, meaning they could not have been part of the training data for those models.

The court also noted that ANI used adversarial prompts asking the model to reproduce articles exactly, yet ANI could not produce a single verbatim copy. The judge’s preliminary view was that similarities likely came from retrieval augmented generation, or RAG, an issue the court will revisit in the main proceedings.

The court tentatively treated AI training under an Indian copyright exception for “private or personal use, including research,” reading research broadly enough to include AI training. According to the article, AI copyright law expert Andres Guadamuz said this is the first time a court has explicitly found that AI training falls under a private use exception.

The judge set limits around that view: training copies must come from lawful sources, not shadow libraries or paywalled sites accessed without permission. OpenAI’s internal processing and the lack of proven memorization or reproduction helped the court side with OpenAI in its fairness analysis.

The ruling also points to a broader tension between AI systems and the news business. Even when training is found lawful, AI-powered summaries can reduce the need for readers to click through to original news sources.

The article cites a Pew Research Center study showing click-through rates to external websites dropped to 8 percent with Google’s AI Overviews, compared with 15 percent without an AI summary. That market effect could matter in future cases, especially where courts assess whether AI products compete with the works they use or summarize.