The Delhi High Court on Tuesday issued notice on an appeal filed by Asian News International (ANI) challenging a single judge's order rejecting its interim injunction application filed in its copyright infringement suit against OpenAI Inc, which founded ChatGPT.

A division bench comprising Justice Avneesh Jhingan and Justice Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora sought response of Open AI and listed the matter for hearing on December 08.

Advocate Siddhant Kumar appeared for ANI. Senior Advocates Arvind Datar and Kapil Sibal appeared for intervenors.

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization headquartered in California. Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 and left the company in 2018. Open AI has founded ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. This is the first lawsuit in India against ChatGPT.

ANI, before the single judge, alleged that its original news content is being “exploited for commercial gain” by OpenAI

ANI's suit alleged that ChatGPT verbatim reproduces ANI's original content in response to users' queries on a real-time basis. It was ANI's case that ChatGPT has been accrediting it with statements and news that never occurred.

OpenAI had challenged the maintainability of the suit in India, arguing its AI models are not trained in the country and its servers are based in the United States.

It had also countered by asserting that its machine learning process is transformative, that news facts cannot be copyrighted, and that outlets can request to be placed on a blocklist if they do not wish to be crawled.

Rejecting interim injunction plea of ANI, the single judge said that Artificial Intelligence company OpenAI's act of storing ANI's original works does not amount to copyright infringement under the provisions of the Copyright Act, 1957.

With respect to the defence of research, the court had said that process of training LLMs underlying ChatGPT involves machine learning of the stored literary works by screening and organising them.

Case Title: ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v. OpenAI Inc & Anr.