Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York court. The lawsuit accuses the AI giant of use publishers’ content without permission to train your artificial intelligence models and generate responses that reproduce your articles verbatim. They also accuse him of cannibalizing the content of his websites.
Another demand and they go…. Copyright is one of the black points of artificial intelligence research. Protection for content creators has simply been nonexistent. This is a ‘jungle’ where AI trains and learns from anywhere without authorization and/or compensation. There are infinite cases of companies, media, professionals, journalists or teachers, whose rights have been violated. Thus we have seen previous lawsuits against Google, Meta and also against OpenAI.
Encyclopedia Britannica sues OpenAI
The lawsuit accuses OpenAI of using nearly 100,000 online articles from the Encyclopedia Britannica as training data for your AI language models. The complaint acknowledges that only OpenAI knows the full extent of the unauthorized copying. Britannica, which owns Merriam-Webster as a subsidiary, argues that the law does not permit OpenAI’s systematic disregard for its intellectual property rights and requires it to be held accountable for the substantial harm it is causing and the multibillion-dollar profits it is making through that infringement.
«ChatGPT provides narrative responses to user queries that often contain reproductions, summaries or abbreviated versions, verbatim or near verbatim, of the original content, including works protected by copyright of the plaintiffs”the lawsuit argues.
The lawsuit is structured around two legal pillars, both similar to the framework the plaintiffs used when they accused search engine Perplexity of similar practices in September 2025. The first is copyright infringement under the Copyright Act of 1976, which gives authors the exclusive right to reproduce and distribute their works.
Britannica argues that OpenAI violated those rights at multiple stages– By extracting information from your websites to create training data, feeding that content to your models during training, and subsequently generating results that faithfully reproduce or summarize the originals when users query ChatGPT on topics covered by Britannica’s editorial catalog.
The second pillar of demand is trademark lawprotected by the Lanham Law. By presenting AI-generated responses, which may contain inaccuracies or hallucinations, along with Britannica and Merriam-Webster’s famous trademarks and brand identities, the lawsuit argues that OpenAI misleads users into believing that Britannica or Merriam-Webster has endorsed or is the source of such responses.
Britannica’s reputation is built on accuracy accumulated over more than 250 years; The lawsuit alleges that associating that brand with information manufactured using artificial intelligence causes direct reputational damage that goes beyond the mere loss of copyright.
AI is an existential threat for publishers and media
The underlying business case follows the logic established in the wave of publisher lawsuits against AI companies. Britannica’s current business is primarily digital, based on subscriptions and advertising revenue that depends on web traffic. Thousands of media outlets like ours can say the same thing.
When ChatGPT answers a user’s question about, for example, the causes of the French Revolution or the properties of a chemical element, using content from Britannica articles, those users have fewer reasons to visit the Britannica website directly. The complaint describes ChatGPT as taking advantage of Britannica’s high-quality and trusted content, transferring the value of said content to OpenAI without any compensation.
The complaint states that the alleged copying by OpenAI is not only a legal violation, but an existential threat to a model that cannot survive if The economic benefits of this content go to AI platforms instead of their creators.
Although the AI giants have signed some agreements to compensate for content, whether Britannica’s lawsuit against OpenAI goes the route of an out-of-court settlement or a trial depends on the latter. What the lawsuit makes clear is that publishers with a strong brand reputation and a fair guarantee of accuracy are not willing to wait for the industry to self-regulate.
