Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. v. OpenAI, Inc.

##SUMMARY

Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. and Merriam-Webster, Inc. filed suit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York against OpenAI and its affiliated entities, alleging that OpenAI copied nearly 100,000 of the Plaintiffs' articles to train and ground ChatGPT, and that ChatGPT's outputs reproduce, paraphrase, or falsely attribute that content. The Complaint also alleges trademark violations arising from ChatGPT's hallucinated and misattributed references to the Britannica and Merriam-Webster brands.

##FACTS & CLAIMS

On 13 March 2026, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. and Merriam-Webster, Inc. commenced proceedings against OpenAI, Inc., OpenAI LP, OpenAI GP LLC, OpenAI, LLC, OpenAI OpCo LLC, OpenAI Global LLC, OAI Corporation, LLC, OpenAI Holdings, LLC, and OpenAI Group PBC in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, before Judge Sidney H. Stein. The Complaint alleges that OpenAI's ChatGPT products, built on the GPT family of large language models and supplemented by retrieval-augmented generation, were trained on datasets including Common Crawl, WebText, and WebText2 that scraped thousands of the Plaintiffs' copyrighted articles in violation of Britannica's terms of use, which expressly prohibit AI training use without consent. The Plaintiffs contend that ChatGPT's outputs frequently reproduce their content verbatim or in close paraphrase, and that GPT-4 has "memorised" substantial portions of Britannica's articles.

Causes of action include direct copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 106(1) and (2), vicarious and contributory copyright infringement, and false designation of origin and dilution of the Plaintiffs' trademarks under the Lanham Act, arising from ChatGPT's alleged hallucinated and misattributed content bearing the Britannica and Merriam-Webster marks. The Plaintiffs seek statutory and actual damages, restitution of profits, a permanent injunction against further infringement, and attorneys' fees and costs.

This summary is provided for educational and research purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Allegations described are those made in the filings. Please consult the underlying source documents.