Encyclopedia Britannica Sues OpenAI Over Alleged Copyright Infringement

Encyclopedia Britannica and its subsidiary Merriam-Webster have sued OpenAI, alleging the artificial intelligence company committed copyright infringement by scraping their articles to train its AI, TechCrunch reported Monday (March 16).

Britannica also alleges that OpenAI violated trademark law by making up information and falsely attributing it to the publisher, according to the report.

The company alleges in its lawsuit that with these practices, OpenAI “starves web publishers like [Britannica] of revenue” and jeopardizes “the public’s continued access to high-quality and trustworthy online information,” per the report.

Reuters also reported on the lawsuit Monday, saying Britannica seeks monetary damages and a court order blocking the alleged infringement.

Reached by PYMNTS, a spokesperson for OpenAI said in an emailed statement: “ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives. Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use.”

It was reported in September that Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster sued Perplexity, alleging that it misused their copyrighted content in its AI-driven “answer engine.”

That complaint alleges that Perplexity copied articles from Britannica and Merriam-Webster and reduced their online traffic by directing users to AI-generated summaries instead of original sources.

In a September press release announcing the lawsuit against Perplexity, Jorge Cauz, who was CEO of Britannica Group at the time, said: “As demonstrated by today’s action, we will take all steps necessary to protect our data and intellectual capital so we can continue to offer innovative digital instructional and informational solutions that enhance student learning outcomes, assist educators in their teaching journeys, and inform and delight learners of all ages.”

There have been several other lawsuits alleging that AI companies committed copyright infringement.

It was reported in August that Anthropic settled a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by a group of U.S. authors. In that case, the authors alleged that the AI company used pirated books without permission to train its AI assistant.

In February 2025, a group of news publishers sued Cohere for copyright infringement, alleging that the company improperly used copyrighted works to train its large language model and displayed large portions of articles while bypassing visits to the publishers’ websites.

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