Jakarta, INTI - Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that OpenAI has committed massive copyright infringement, as reported by TechCrunch on Wednesday, March 17, 2026.
In the lawsuit, Encyclopedia Britannica owns its copyright to nearly 100,000 online articles, but the articles have been scraped and used to train OpenAI's LLM without permission.
The lawsuit stated that ChatGPT deprives web-based publishers like Encyclopedia Britannica of revenue because the chatbot service generates “responses to users’ queries that substitute, and directly compete with, the content from publishers like [Britannica]."
Britannica Alleges OpenAI for Using Its Content for AI Training
Moreover, the lawsuit alleges that OpenAI violates copyright law when it produces outputs that contain “full or partial verbatim reproductions” in ChatGPT's RAG (retrieval augmented generation) workflow.
OpenAI's RAG tool itself is how the LLM trains the AI system by scanning the web or other databases for newly updated information when responding to a query.
Encyclopedia Britannica alleges that OpenAI also violates the Lanham Act, a trademark law, and falsely attributes to publishers.
Encyclopedia Britannica claims that ChatGPT jeopardizes the public's continued access to high-quality, trustworthy online information.
“ChatGPT starves web publishers like [Britannica] of revenue by generating responses to users’ queries that substitute, and directly compete with, the content from publishers like [Britannica],” the lawsuit stated.
Other Publishers and Authors are Also Suing OpenAI
Encyclopedia Britannica is not the only one suing OpenAI over copyright infringement. Other authors and publishers who also sue the AI giant are the New York Times and Ziff Davis, the owner of Mashable, CNET, IGN, and PC Mag. As well as the Chicago Tribune, the Denver Post, the Sun Sentinel, the Toronto Star, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
There is no strong legal precedent for determining whether using copyrighted content to train for an LLM is a copyright infringement. However, in a similar case, Anthropic had convinced federal judge William Alsup that the use of copyrighted content as training data was transformative enough to be legal.
However, Alsup argued that Anthropic violated the law by illegally downloading millions of books rather than paying for them, which warranted a $1.5 billion class-action settlement for affected authors.
Conclusion
Encyclopaedia Britannica sues OpenAI, alleging large-scale copyright infringement through the unauthorized use of its content to train AI models and the reproduction of that content in outputs. Britannice is also concerned about lost revenue and misinformation. The case adds to a growing wave of lawsuits from publishers and authors. It underscores ongoing uncertainty about whether such AI practices are legal.
Read more: Ericsson Unveils AI-Driven RAN Innovation to Boost 5G Expansion in Indonesia