After ANI appealed the Delhi HC’s July 24 order refusing it interim relief, a Division Bench asked OpenAI to respond to the news agency’s plea for temporary restraint. A bench of Justices Avneesh Jhingan and Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora asked OpenAI to submit its response to the petition filed by the news agency ANI.
The Delhi HC will hear the case on December 5, reports Bar and Bench. During the hearing on 14 September, advocate Kapil Sibal appeared on behalf of the Broadband India Forum (BIF) and asked the HC to be an intervening party to the case. The HC will decide BIF’s intervention application at the next hearing.
What is ANI’s argument? ANI’s detailed grounds in the fresh appeal are not yet public. However, based on ANI’s arguments in the proceedings so far (detailed timeline below), ANI argues that OpenAI’s use of its copyrighted news content to train ChatGPT constitutes copyright infringement, not “fair dealing.” It also argues that training a commercial model does not qualify as “private or personal use” or “research” under the Copyright Act, 1957.
The news agency further argues that LLM training involves copying and storing news content and therefore amounts to reproduction. Therefore, it argues that OpenAI should obtain a licence to use its content in its LLMs or AI outputs. It further argues that it was entitled to interim relief to restrain this use pending trial.
While the ANI-OpenAI dispute remains unresolved, The Times of India and The Indian Express have separately announced partnerships with OpenAI for ‘discoverability’ on the ChatGPT app.
A short timeline of ANI vs OpenAI:
September 2026: ANI has appealed the Delhi High Court order that allowed OpenAI to train ChatGPT on its journalism. [Full article]
July 2026: The Delhi High Court refused to grant an interim injunction to ANI and noted that ANI failed to submit required evidence to prove the copyright infringement. [Full article] — [Judgement PDF]
October 2025: Large Language Models (LLMs) do not violate the Copyright Act, argued the Broadband India Forum (BIF) in front of the Delhi High Court. [Full article]
August 2025: Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) argued that OpenAI “scrapes, stores, and reproduces” news articles from its members without paying any license fee or attribution. [Full article]
August 2025: In a petition heard by the Delhi High Court on August 5, 2025, the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) argued that OpenAI “scrapes, stores, and reproduces” news articles from its members without paying any license fee or attribution. [Full article]
May 2025: ANI benefited from traffic driven by ChatGPT’s search function, argued OpenAI in front of the Delhi HC. [Full article]
April 2025: ANI asked the Delhi High Court to pass an injunction barring OpenAI from scraping data from its subscribers. [Full article]
March 2025: OpenAI continued to access ANI’s content through its subscribers, alleged the latter’s lawyer Sidhant Kumar in front of the Delhi HC. He also argued that OpenAI, in contradiction of its previous declaration that it had stopped scraping ANI’s website since October last year, continued to send crawlers to ANI’s website. Kumar provided a ChatGPT prompt as an example, which asked for the “latest headlines” from the ANI news portal. After receiving this prompt, OpenAI’s chatbot proceeded to output the most recent news articles from ANI’s website, alongside a link. [Full article]
March 2025: Amicus curiae Adarsh Ramanujan told the Delhi HC that storage of copyrighted material amounts to infringement. [Full article]
January 2025: OpenAI informed the Delhi High Court that complying with any directive to remove the training data behind its ChatGPT service would conflict with its legal obligations in the United States. [Full article]
November 2024: “Copyright does not protect ideas or facts. It only protects expression,” argued advocate Amit Sibal, representing OpenAI in a defamation lawsuit filed by ANI. [Full article]
November 2024: Delhi High Court appointed two amici curiae to assist ANI vs OpenAI. Amici Curiae are individuals or organisations who are not parties to a case but are brought in to assist the court with their expertise. [Full article]
Also Read: