Delhi High Court seeks OpenAI’s reply on ANI plea to stop ChatGPT from using its content

The Delhi High Court on Tuesday issued a notice to ChatGPT creator OpenAI on an appeal filed by news agency Asian News International (ANI). The plea challenges a 24 July single-judge order that denied interim relief to ANI in its copyright lawsuit against the artificial intelligence (AI) company.

A division bench of Justices Avneesh Jhingan and Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora issued the notice after hearing arguments from senior counsel Sidhant Kumar, representing ANI. The court asked OpenAI to file its response and scheduled the next hearing for December.

Kumar told the court that OpenAI had previously undertaken not to scrape or download content from ANI’s website as an interim arrangement. “From 11 September 2024 till the passing of the impugned order, a certain status was obtained, which was that they were not downloading or scraping content from my website. That statement was made. They volunteered that they will not take news content from my website,” Kumar argued.

The court, however, declined to pass an order without hearing OpenAI’s response.

Senior counsel Kapil Sibal, attending via video conference on behalf of an intervenor, requested that his client also be heard in the matter. “The single judge heard us. We need to be heard. This has global implications,” Sibal told the court. An intervenor is a third party who was not originally part of a case, but steps in because the judgment will directly affect their interests or rights.

Queries emailed to OpenAI remained unanswered at the time of publishing.

ANI was denied interim relief in July

ANI was challenging a July order by Justice Amit Bansal, who refused to grant interim relief to the news agency in its copyright case against OpenAI. He said an injunction would harm not only OpenAI but also to public interest and the development of AI. The court held that the balance of convenience favoured OpenAI and observed that generative AI technology serves a significant public interest by supporting research, education, accessibility and the dissemination of knowledge.

The single-judge bench clarified in its July order that Indian courts have jurisdiction to hear the dispute even though OpenAI's servers are located in the US, holding that the alleged infringement had a sufficient connection with India because ChatGPT is accessible in the country and ANI suffered the alleged harm in India.

However, the court held that ANI failed to show ChatGPT had substantially reproduced its copyrighted news reports, adding that the agency also did not demonstrate any actual market harm or loss of subscriptions stemming from OpenAI's use of its content.