Delhi HC’s ruling in OpenAI copyright case shouldn’t be read as a blanket exemption for AI developers – lawyer
11 August 2026
Rahul Govind | founder and principal @ IP Ahead, New Delhi
According to Rahul Govind, founder and principal at IP Ahead in New Delhi, the Delhi High Court’s ruling in ANI Media v. OpenAI favouring OpenAIshould not be read as a blanket exemption for AI developers.
Indian news agency Asian News International, or ANI Media, had accused OpenAI of using its content to train ChatGPT without authorization, arguing that the AI chatbot’s outputs or responses were substantially similar to ANI’s material because they carried both the original and creative components of the media agency’s text. Some of the responses were alleged to be exact or nearly exact copies of ANI’s data, according to the media outfit.
The Delhi High Court released its judgment on July 24, 2026, giving OpenAI its first copyright victory in India. The court found, at the interim stage, that OpenAI’s use of ANI’s publicly available content for training fell under the “fair dealing” exception.
According to Govind, the decision is an important early Indian judicial engagement with the copyright questions raised by generative AI. “Its central significance is that the Court, at the interim stage, found OpenAI’s storage of ANI’s publicly accessible works for LLM (large language model) training to be covered by the research exception in Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act. The judgment separates the act of training a model from the question of whether its outputs reproduce protected expression. That distinction will be central to future AI copyright disputes.”
Likewise, the court found no prima facie evidence that ChatGPT had memorized and reproduced ANI’s works, or that its outputs were substantially similar to ANI’s original literary works.
“This places real weight on evidence of output-level copying and market harm, rather than treating all use of publicly available material in training as automatically infringing. However, this should not be read as a blanket exemption for AI developers,” Govind reminded. “The ruling concerns an interim application, is fact-specific, and expressly leaves the final merits of the suit open.”
“For publishers, the decision reinforces the need to develop practical licensing, attribution and opt-out mechanisms alongside litigation. For AI companies, it underlines that technical safeguards against verbatim reproduction remain important,” he added.
- Espie Angelica A. de Leon
