ANI Media v. OpenAI (High Court of Delhi)

ANI Media v. OpenAI is a copyright case before the High Court of Delhi in which the Indian news agency ANI Media alleges OpenAI trained its models on ANI's copyrighted works without authorization. ANI filed the suit in November 2024 (Source: business-standard.com).

Parties and interveners

The plaintiff is ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. and the defendant OpenAI OpCo LLC. Interveners appearing in the injunction proceedings included IGAP, the Broadband India Forum, Flux AI Labs, the Federation of Indian Publishers, DNPA and IMI, and appointed two amici curiae, Adarsh Ramanujan and Professor Arul George Scaria (Source: chatgptiseatingtheworld.com).

Procedural history and ruling

On July 24, 2026, the court denied ANI Media's preliminary-injunction motion in a 135-page ruling, holding that using copyrighted works to train AI models — and storing copies for training purposes — is prima facie fair dealing under Section 52(1)(a) of India's Copyright Act. The ruling cited the U.S. decisions in Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta and the Google Books decisions. The denial is preliminary; the case can still proceed to trial (Source: chatgptiseatingtheworld.substack.com; chatgptiseatingtheworld.com).

Justice Amit Bansal decided the injunction application (I.A. 45300/2024, under Order XXXIX Rules 1 and 2 of the Code of Civil Procedure) after reserving judgment on March 27, 2026. The judgment addresses four issues: whether Indian courts have jurisdiction given that OpenAI's servers are located in the United States; whether OpenAI's use of ANI's works to generate ChatGPT responses infringes, including whether the model memorises and regurgitates ANI's articles and whether its responses substantially reproduce them; whether storing ANI's content to train ChatGPT infringes; and whether the use qualifies as fair dealing under Section 52. Its Section 52(1)(a) analysis applies a purpose test, asking whether commercial use can fall within "private or personal use, including research", and a fairness test covering whether the use is limited to training, whether it competes economically with ANI, and whether it serves the public interest (Source: chatgptiseatingtheworld.com). As reported by Business Standard, the court held that ANI had failed to show that ChatGPT memorised or reproduced its reports in user-facing outputs, and that storing the articles for training falls within the research limb of the fair-dealing exemption (Source: business-standard.com).

Business Standard described the ruling as the first substantive Indian judicial finding on training large language models on copyrighted news without a licence (Source: business-standard.com). It is the first reported application of India's fair-dealing provision to AI training and extends the transatlantic fair-use debate to Indian law, importing the reasoning of the U.S. training-is-transformative line of cases.

Relationships

• related: AI Copyright Litigation — Analysis — the cross-jurisdiction docket this case now joins
• related: Bartz v. Anthropic, Kadrey v. Meta — U.S. decisions the ruling cites
• related: OpenAI — defendant