Delhi HC to decide: Can OpenAI use copyrighted material to train ChatGPT?
News agency ANI has sought restraining orders against the American organisation. Any observation, even preliminary in nature, made by the court on what is fair use of copyrighted material, will be significant – and a first for an Indian constitutional court.
The Delhi High Court has held that OpenAI’s training of its large language models (LLMs)on original retrieved copyrighted works constituted fair dealing, and did not amount to infringement of copyright.
The interim ruling Friday by Justice Amit Bansal extends a measure of legal cover to developers of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots such as OpenAI to continue training on Indian-origin content without licensing agreements, and also interprets broadly what constitutes “fair use” of copyrighted works.
The suit, the first of its kind in Indian jurisdiction, was moved by news agency ANI Media Pvt Ltd in 2024 against OpenAI Inc and OpenAI OpCo LLC, seeking an injunction against the use of its copyrighted content in the training of LLMs.
California-based OpenAI is the developer of the ChatGPT series of generative AI models. Open AI OpCo LLC is the commercial arm of the organisation.
“…in my prima facie view, Open AI’s acts of storage of the literary works of ANI for the training of its LLMs would fall under Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act (fair dealing) and hence, would not amount to infringement,” Justice Bansal ruled.
He took into consideration that OpenAI’s use of the copyrighted works for training its LLMs is “completely an internal process” and does not involve providing the copyrighted material to any third party.
“I am also of the prima facie view that the outputs generated by ChatGPT using the RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) technique does not amount to infringement under the Copyright Act since the outputs generated by OpenAI were not substantially similar to ANI (inputs),” he said.
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Justice Bansal said ANI had “failed to satisfy” the court “that any memorisation or regurgitation” of ANI’s copyrighted works happened through the responses generated by ChatGPT”.
The “balance of convenience” was in favour of OpenAI, the judge said – “irreparable injury would be caused not only to OpenAI but also to the public at large” if any interim injunction was granted in favour of ANI.
Two district courts in the United States took a broadly similar line in two closely watched copyright cases that were decided within days of each other in June 2025.
A group of writers had filed a class action complaint against Anthropic, the company behind the Claude family of LLMs; in the second case, a group of authors had sued Meta Platforms, whose research division Meta AI has developed the chatbot Llama.
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The judges held that AI works did not substitute for the original works; rather, they generated something new from them. The ruling in the Meta case underlined that the plaintiffs had not shown that the training measurably harmed the market for their books. Both US verdicts have been relied upon by the Delhi High Court in its ruling.
Several media and publishing organisations and associations such as the Federation of Indian Publishers (FIP), Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), and the Indian Music Industry (IMI) had joined as parties to ANI’s suit and raised similar objections to OpenAI’s training model.
On the ruling Friday, Delhi-based IP lawyer Amit Kumar Panigrahi, partner at Kochhar & Co., said the verdict, apart from being a boost to developers, is likely to prompt copyright owners to revisit their contractual frameworks, including licensing models and AI-specific restrictions in content access and use agreements.
The ruling, he said, marks the first interpretation of key provisions of the Copyright Act in the context of machine learning and LLM training, filling a significant gap in Indian AI copyright jurisprudence.
Sohini Ghosh is a Senior Correspondent at The Indian Express. Previously based in Ahmedabad covering Gujarat, she recently moved to the New Delhi bureau, where she primarily covers legal developments at the Delhi High Court
Professional Profile
Background: An alumna of the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ), she previously worked with ET NOW before joining The Indian Express.
Core Beats: Her reporting is currently centered on the Delhi High Court, with a focus on high-profile constitutional disputes, disputes over intellectual property, criminal and civil cases, issues of human rights and regulatory law (especially in the areas of technology and healthcare).
Earlier Specialty: In Gujarat, she was known for her rigorous coverage in the beats of crime, law and policy, and social justice issues, including the 2002 riot cases, 2008 serial bomb blast case, 2016 flogging of Dalits in Una, among others.
She has extensively covered health in the state, including being part of the team that revealed the segregation of wards at the state’s largest government hospital on lines of faith in April 2020.
With Ahmedabad being a UNESCO heritage city, she has widely covered urban development and heritage issues, including the redevelopment of the Sabarmati Ashram
Recent Notable Articles (Late 2025)
Her recent reporting from the Delhi High Court covers major political, constitutional, corporate, and public-interest legal battles:
High-Profile Case Coverage
She has extensively covered the various legal battles - including for compensation under the aegis of North East Delhi Riots Claims Commission - pertaining to the 2020 northeast Delhi riots, as well as 1984 anti-Sikh riots.
She has also led coverage at the intersection of technology and governance, and its impact on the citizenry, from, and beyond courtrooms — such as the government’s stakeholder consultations for framing AI-Deepfake policy.
Signature Style
Sohini is recognized for her sustained reporting from courtrooms and beyond. She specialises in breaking down dense legal arguments to make legalese accessible for readers. Her transition from Gujarat to Delhi has seen her expand her coverage on regulatory, corporate and intellectual property law, while maintaining a strong commitment to human rights and lacuna in the criminal justice system.
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