2026-03-18 15:00:56
OpenAI is being sued by the dictionary firm Merriam-Webster.
The company, a subsidiary of Encylopaedia Britannica, filed a lawsuit in a Manhattan federal court last week that accuses OpenAI of using its material to train its AI models.
In the complaint, Britannica and Merriam-Webster accuse the ChatGPT developer of using its online articles, encyclopeadia and dictionary entries to teach the chatbot how to respond to human prompts.
The firms argue that ChatGPT has “cannibalised” their web traffic with AI-generated summaries of their content.
The lawsuit claims: “Defendants’ ChatGPT-based AI products free ride on Plaintiffs’ trusted, high-quality content — made possible through the diligent work of human researchers, writers, editors, and creators — by cannibalising traffic to Defendants’ websites with AI-generated summaries of Plaintiffs’ own content.”
In the lawsuit, Britannica claims that OpenAI unlawfully copied almost 100,000 of its articles to train its AI.
The complaint says that ChatGPT “generates outputs that copy or mimic, sometimes verbatim” information from their encyclopedia entries, dictionary definitions and other articles and takes away users from Britannica’s websites.
Britannica claims that ChatGPT’s copying of the information is “unlicenced and without authorisation” and notes that the “true extent” of how much content has been stolen is “uniquely” within OpenAI’s knowledge.
The firm also accuses OpenAI of infringing trademarks by suggesting that it has permission to reproduce its material, as well as wrongfully citing Britannica in false AI “hallucinations”.
OpenAI has disputed the claim, with a spokesperson saying in a statement: “Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use.”
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