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Two old-school reference works competing with a very modern techno product. Encyclopedia Britannica and its subsidiary, Merriam-Webster, filed a lawsuit against it OpenAIAlleging that the technology company used Britannica content to train artificial intelligence models without permission. OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, copied Britannica’s copyrighted content to train its large language models, the suit said.
“ChatGPT then provides narrative responses to user queries that often contain verbatim or near-verbatim transcriptions, summaries or abbreviations of the original content, including Britannica’s copyrighted works.” The lawsuit claims that.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, the parent company of CNET, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that it infringed Ziff Davis’s copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
The lawsuit said the products’ ChatGPT-based summaries of Encyclopedia Britannica content cannibalize traffic, and that OpenAI reproduces “the copyrighted content of web publishers without license or remuneration.”
The lawsuit continues from Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster direction Content owners are suing AI companies for copyright infringement.
Anthropic and Meta last year won lawsuits under the fair use exception that allows them to use copyrighted content without creators’ permission. Britannica also filed a lawsuit against Confusion Last year, which is still waiting.
Regarding the new lawsuit, an OpenAI spokesperson told CNET via email: “Our models enable innovation, are trained on publicly available data and are grounded in fair use.”
Encyclopedia Britannica did not immediately respond to a request for comment.