Explained: Why Delhi High Court dismissed ANI’s plea for interim injunction against OpenAI in copyright infringement case
· OpIndia
On the 24th of July 2026, the Delhi High Court rejected the plea filed by the Asian News International (ANI) seeking an interim injunction against OpenAI in its copyright infringement lawsuit involving ChatGPT.
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The court said that the grant of an interim injunction against OpenAI in favour of ANI would inflict “irreparable injury” to OpenAI and the public at large.
The decision, however, concerns only the interim application, while the main copyright suit continues.
OpenAI storing ANI content to train LLMs not copyright infringement: Delhi High Court dismisses interim injunction plea
While pronouncing the verdict, Justice Amit Bansal said that the court is prima facie of the view that OpenAI storing original content generated by ANI does not amount to copyright infringement under the Copyright Act of 1957.
Justice Bansal also stressed that the outputs generated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT in response to user queries were not essentially similar to the original ANI content.
“I am of the prima facie view that OpenAI’s act of storing ANI’s original works…falls under Section 52(1)(a) Copyright Act and therefore does not amount to infringement under Section 5. I am also of the prima facie view that outputs generated by ChatGPT…does not amount to copyright infringement under Section 51, since outputs generated by OpenAI were not substantially similar to ANIs…” Justice Bansal stated.
The Delhi High Court further opined that ANI failed to satisfy the court that OpenAI’s ChatGPT responses to user queries involved memorisation or regurgitation of ANI content. Thus, ANI could not, prima facie, make a case for grant of interim injunction.
“…the illustrations given in the plaint are post the training of OpenAI’s LLMs and a case for memorization of ANI’s works on the basis of the said illustrations cannot be made out. Therefore, at this prima facie stage, the contention of ANI that OpenAI permanently stores the training data in order to memorize and regurgitate ANI’s works cannot be accepted. At best, these are disputed questions which can only be determined during trial upon parties leading evidence. Based on discussion above it cannot be concluded that the responses produced by ChatGPT are a substantial reproduction of the news articles of ANI. Hence, at a prima facie stage, ANI has failed to make out a case of copyright infringement based on the responses generated by ChatGPT i.e. the output claim,” the court order reads.
Pertinently, the court emphasised that granting an interim injunction in favour of ANI would cause “irreparable injury” not only to OpenAI but also to the public.
“ANI has failed to satisfy this court that any memorization regurgitation of ANI’s work has happened from responses generated by ChatGPT…in view of discussion above ANI has failed to make out prima facie case for grant of interim injunction…Irreparable injury would be caused not only to Open AI but also to the public at large if an interim injunction is granted in favour of ANI. Application dismissed,” Justice Bansal said.
Justice Bansal, however, highlighted that he had ruled in ANI’s favour on the issue of territorial jurisdiction.
Thus, the Delhi High Court found no prima facie case strong enough for an interim injunction that would severely restrict OpenAI from using ANI content for training its Large Language Models (LLMs). The court allowed OpenAI’s operations to continue pending final adjudication of the copyright infringement lawsuit.
Background of the case: Allegations of ANI and responses of OpenAI
The ANI-OpenAI lawsuit began in 2024. The Delhi High Court summons in the matter was issued in November 2024. The lawsuit was filed by ANI accusing OpenAI, the US-based artificial intelligence research organisation headquartered in California.
In its lawsuit, ANI alleged that OpenAI scraped and used its copyrighted news reports, articles, and other publicly available and paywalled/subscriber content republished by licensees without prior permission. Without obtaining permission or a license, OpenAI used ANI content to train ChatGPT and related LLMs.
ANI also alleged that many times, ChatGPT generated responses that were either reproduced from ANI platforms verbatim or were closely summarised.
Furthermore, ANI claimed that ChatGPT falsely attributed fabricated stories or statements to ANI, damaging its reputation and potentially disseminating misinformation.
Excerpt taken from relevant court judgment. (Source: delhihighcourt.nic.in)Hearings continued on multiple dates in the Delhi High Court. The court reserved judgment on the interim injunction in March this year and pronounced the verdict on 24th July 2026.
Meanwhile, the court appointed two amici curiae, advocate Adarsh Ramanujan and Prof. Arul George Scaria of NLSIU, to assist, and allowed interventions by entities like the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), Federation of Indian Publishers, etc.
The court focused on four main questions under the Copyright Act of 1957;
- Whether OpenAI storing ANI content for training ChatGPT amounted to copyright infringement.
- Whether use of data to generate ChatGPT responses for users constitutes infringement
- Whether such a user qualifies as “fair dealing” under Section 52
- Application of jurisdiction since OpenAI servers are mainly in the US.
During hearings, ANI contended that unauthorised storage and reproduction of its works for commercial training violates exclusive rights under Section 14 and amounts to infringement under Section 51.
Through its lawyers, the news agency also argued that dataset curation and temporary or permanent storage for training is not protected.
ANI further claimed that ChatGPT outputs, including those through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can reproduce or significantly summarise protected expression, diverting traffic and hurting ANI’s revenue to creat original journalism.
The news agency also argued that memorisation or regurgitation of training data can occur, and false attribution of fake content can inflict reputational harm.
In addition, ANI contended that fair dealing exceptions under Section 52, which include personal use, criticism, research, etc, do no cover large scale commercial training by a for-profit AI company. ANI argued that such actions should not be permitted in the absence of proper licensing.
In October 2024, ANI had offered OpenAI a licensing arrangement akin to deals the AI giant has with Western media outlets like the Associated Press, Financial Times, and Condé Nast. However, OpenAI rejected ANI’s offer.
ANI was reported to have sought Rs 2 crore damages, a permanent injunction, and most immediately an interim injunction restraining OpenAI from storing, reproducing, publishing or using its content in any form, including through ChatGPT, and directing it to disable access to ANI content.
In response, OpenAI contended that it had already blocklisted ANI’s website from its crawlers back in October 2024, and would also exclude the domain from future training. OpenAI also denied unlawful reproduction or memorisation of ANI’s expressive content.
Excerpt taken from relevant court judgment. (Source: delhihighcourt.nic.in)Notably, expressive content here means the original creative expression, including specific wording, structure, style, opinions or artistic choices, that copyright protects.
Non-expressive content, on the contrary, includes unprotected elements like ideas, facts, functional copying data, or statistical patterns.
Represented by senior counsel Amit Sibal, OpenAI said that it is an “admitted position that storage of data takes place only for the purposes of training. Creation of copy during the training process is an intermediate step. Once the training process is over, an LLM does not have access to data.”
It also claimed that the training process does not involve ANI data alone, rather “ANI’s data would only be a minuscule amount of the total data on which training takes place.”
“The training process is unconcerned with each work’s unique expression. The LLMs underlying ChatGPT encode the learnt meanings in the form of a ‘vector database’ during the pre-training process, which is equivalent to a dictionary and does not amount to additional copies of raw data. Hence, it is incorrect to state that ‘vectorisation’ is an ‘adaptation’ or ‘translation’ of ANI’s works,” OpenAI said.
“The storage is not intended for human consumption or comprehension. Storage is only an intermediate step to derive the non-expressive element,” it added.
Interestingly, despite being a for-profit entity, OpenAI argued that storing ANI’s works for training its LLMs does not amount to copyright infringement as it falls within the exception under Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act (fair dealing for private or personal use, including research.
“The Copyright Act as originally enacted in 1957 used the words “research or private study” in its fair dealing clause. The Notes on clauses for Copyright Amendment Bill, 1994 (which was enacted as Copyright Amendment Act, 1994) makes it clear that the amendment was proposed in 1992 to expand the “unduly narrow interpretation of the words “private study””. The latest amendment in the Copyright Act, 1957 included the words “personal use”, in addition to the already existing words “private use” and “research”, OpenAI submitted.
OpenAI maintained that its act of storage and use of training data falls within the ambit of “private use”, including “research”, which is protected under Section 52(1)(a)(i) of the Copyright Act and does not amount to copyright infringement.
Excerpt taken from relevant court judgment. (Source: delhihighcourt.nic.in)It further argued that there is no restriction on “private use” being only for non-commercial purposes. “This view is reinforced from a perusal of sub-clauses (ii) and (iii) of Section 52 (1)(a) of the Copyright Act, which do not make the distinction between commercial and non-commercial… Reference in this regard may be made to Section 52(1)(ad) and Section 32(6)(d) of the Copyright Act. Merely because the use by OpenAI is commercial, would not make it unfair,” it said.
Addressing ANI’s revenue harm argument, the for-profit AI research organisation said that while ANI is a news agency which is mainly focused on creating, verifying and distributing news which involved a process of factgathering, investigative journalism and contextualization of stories, LLMs serve as tools such as content creation, researching, brainstorming and idea generation, language translation, learning and education, creative writing, summarizing or paraphrasing.
“Therefore, activities of Open AI cannot substitute the activities carried out by ANI. No evidence has been provided by ANI that Open AI’s use of AI generative use had led to a decrease in their market share,” OpenAI submitted.
Relevant excerpt taken from the Copyright Act of 1947. (Source: copyright.gov.in)Court observations and findings
In the context of “fair dealing”, the court addressed three questions;
- Whether OpenAI’s use of ANI’s original literary works is limited to training its LLMs underlying ChatGPT?
- Whether the usage of ANI’s literary works by Open AI would result in economic competition and would prejudice the legitimate interests of ANI, thereby causing actual or potential damage to ANI?
- Whether the functions performed by OpenAI through ChatGPT serve the overall public interest?
Addressing the first question, the court observed that ANI has not been able to establish memorisation of data or its regurgitation, or communication of the exact copies of ANI’s works to the public.
It said that documents submitted by OpenAI indicate that its LLMs underlying ChatGPT are not trained to reproduce the training material to the public but to use training data to generate new responses and perform novel tasks in response to novel user prompts.
“This Court has not been given any instance where OpenAI has used the literary works of ANI for any purposes other than for training. Hence, in my opinion, it would be safe to conclude that the storage by OpenAI is only for the purposes of training OpenAI’s LLMs underlying ChatGPT,” the court said.
Addressing the second question about economic competition, the court differentiated between the primary functions of ANI and OpenAI and their revenue models.
In this regard, Justice Amit Bansal concluded that “except for bare averments, nothing has been placed on record on behalf of ANI to show that they have lost any market share or there has been a reduction in subscription revenues due to operations of OpenAI. Hence, in my prima facie opinion, the use of ANI’s works by Open AI would not result in market substitution of ANI’s works and consequently, will not affect its market share or cause actual or potential damage to ANI.”
On the third question, whether functions performed by OpenAI via ChatGPT serve the larger public interest, the court highlighted the benefits of trained LLMs underlying ChatGPT.
“Training LLMs underlying ChatGPT therefore contributes to advancing scientific knowledge, developing innovative computational tools, disseminating information, promoting education, enhancing accessibility, and advancing artificial intelligence research,” the court said.
Justice Bansal concluded that the factor of public interest also stands established. “Thus, on a prima facie view, all the factors for establishing the aspect of fair dealing stand satisfied in the present case, and the fairness test stands fulfilled,” the court said.
The court also noted that despite having the ability to block its website vis-à-vis any third party, including OpenAI, the news agency has not used the opt-out option, nor have its subscribers/licensees.
The court also highlighted the absence of any material evidence indicating that the activities of OpenAI have resulted in ANI losing subscribers or suffering a loss from its news syndication business.
Excerpt taken from relevant court order. (Source: delhihighcourt.nic.in)In view of these findings, the court dismissed ANI’s plea for interim injunction against OpenAI, although the court stated that observations made in the context of the present application will have no bearing on the final outcome of the suit.