Encyclopedia Britannica is suing OpenAI for allegedly ‘memorizing’ its content with ChatGPT

What happened

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster filed a lawsuit against OpenAI on Friday, alleging the company used their copyrighted content to train ChatGPT without permission. The publishers claim OpenAI violated copyright on nearly 100,000 articles and that ChatGPT generates responses "substantially similar" to their original content. This is the latest in a series of copyright lawsuits facing OpenAI from content creators and publishers.

Why people care

This lawsuit represents a major test case for how AI companies can legally use existing content to train their models. Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster are established, authoritative reference sources, making this different from previous cases involving news outlets or individual creators. The outcome could set important precedents for the entire AI industry's approach to training data.

The takes

Publishers say

OpenAI illegally scraped and used copyrighted reference content without permission or compensation to train ChatGPT. The AI model essentially "memorized" their proprietary articles and now reproduces substantially similar content, undermining the value of their original work. This represents clear copyright and trademark infringement that demands legal remedy.

OpenAI says

Using publicly available content for AI training falls under fair use protections, as the model transforms and synthesizes information rather than simply copying it. The company maintains that its training practices are legally sound and that AI development requires access to broad datasets to function effectively.

Sources

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