Delhi Court Blocks ANI's Copyright Case Against OpenAI

Judge Amit Bansal of the Delhi High Court denied Asian News International's bid for a preliminary injunction against OpenAI on Friday, closing off, for now, an attempt by one of India's biggest news agencies to stop ChatGPT from using its content. ANI had sued OpenAI on two fronts: training its models on ANI's copyrighted articles, and generating outputs that allegedly reproduced them. Bansal rejected both grounds for interim relief.

The case turned on evidence ANI submitted to prove its point, and that evidence didn't hold up the way the agency expected. It also forced the court to weigh in on questions that AI copyright disputes keep raising worldwide: whether training on copyrighted text counts as infringement, how Retrieval Augmented Generation changes the analysis, and whether an AI company's output causes real economic damage to a publisher operating in a different market. Andres Guadamuz, who studies AI copyright law, called the ruling a significant early win for OpenAI. The specifics of how ANI's own submissions undercut its case, and how Bansal reasoned through memorization and market harm, are laid out in the court's findings below.