Encyclopedia Britannica and its Merriam-Webster subsidiary filed suit against OpenAI on Friday, accusing the artificial intelligence giant of unlawfully copying nearly 100,000 copyrighted articles to train its GPT large language models.
The complaint, filed in Manhattan federal court, alleges that OpenAI scraped Britannica’s encyclopedia entries and Merriam-Webster dictionary definitions without authorization to teach its flagship chatbot ChatGPT to respond to human queries. The publishers allege that ChatGPT generates outputs containing full or near-verbatim reproductions of their content, diverting users who would otherwise visit their websites and depriving them of the subscription and advertising revenue that funds their content creation.
Britannica also accuses OpenAI of using its retrieval-augmented generation system, which allows ChatGPT to scan the web for up-to-date information, to pull from Britannica’s content in real time. The publishers further allege that ChatGPT hallucinations are sometimes falsely attributed to Britannica under the Lanham Act trademark statute, threatening the publisher’s reputation for accuracy.
OpenAI disputed the allegations. “Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use,” a company spokesperson said. Britannica is seeking unspecified monetary damages and a court order blocking the alleged conduct.
Britannica filed a parallel lawsuit against AI search engine Perplexity last September over similar copyright claims; that case is still pending. OpenAI faces a multidistrict litigation in the Southern District of New York consolidating more than a dozen copyright suits from publishers including The New York Times, with no fair use ruling expected before summer. The total number of copyright lawsuits filed against AI companies in the U.S. now stands at 91. The New York Times, Ziff Davis and more than a dozen newspapers across the U.S. and Canada have also sued OpenAI over similar copyright claims. Not all publishers have pursued litigation; News Corp signed a licensing deal with Meta worth up to $50 million annually in March.
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