Copyright infringement accusations against OpenAI

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster filed a formal complaint in New York on March 13, 2026, accusing OpenAI of using their copyrighted content as training data for its artificial intelligence models, particularly ChatGPT. The lawsuit claims that ChatGPT generates responses that reproduce encyclopedia articles verbatim, without the consent of the copyright holders.

Details of the lawsuit

The complaint follows a similar lawsuit filed by the same companies against Perplexity six months earlier, based on nearly identical charges. Britannica and Merriam-Webster argue that OpenAI's unauthorized use of their content constitutes copyright and trademark infringement.

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