Encyclopedia Britannica, the publishing company behind the oldest and one of the most popular general-knowledge compendiums Encyclopedia Britannica and the dictionary Merriam-Webster, is suing OpenAI for intellectual property infringement.
Encyclopedia Britannica Has Filed a Lawsuit Against OpenAI for Violating Its Intellectual Property Rights Through ChatGPT
The publisher is taking its right over its intellectual properties and for factual integrity to federal court. The company alleges that ChatGPT from OpenAI is not merely learning from its articles and entries. It is cannibalizing value while also harming its brands.
Copyright Infringement and Trademark Violation
The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan federal court on 13 March 2026, represents a further escalation in the ongoing legal battles over how artificial intelligence models are trained. Britannica specifically alleges that OpenAI committed industrial-scale copyright infringement by scraping nearly 100000 articles and dictionary entries without permission. Below are the allegations:
• Copyright Infringement
The suit argues that OpenAI used its copyrighted materials to develop and train its large language models or LLMs. These include its GPT-4 model and the subsequent versions and generations of its Generative Pre-trained Transformer model.
• Direct Competition
Encyclopedia Britannica also contends that ChatGPT does more than learn from its data. The generative AI chatbot serves as a direct substitute. It also highlights that ChatGPT provides summaries and near-verbatim reproductions of entries from Britannica and Merriam-Webster. This has cannibalized its web traffic.
• Financial Harm
The lawsuit further claims that OpenAI is starving traditional publishers of the advertising and subscription revenues they depend on to finance their expert-led editorial process by answering user questions from publisher-produced data.
• Trademark Violation
Encyclopedia Britannica also asserts trademark violations. It accuses OpenAI of infringing its trademarks whenever ChatGPT hallucinates and falsely attributes those statements to Encyclopedia Britannica or Merriam-Webster. This creates confusion and harms the reputation of the Britannica brands.
Further Characteristic of the Britannica Lawsuit
The lawsuit filed by Encyclopedia Britannica against OpenAI targets both the training phase and the operational phase of the LLMs. It contends that the retrieval-augmented generation or RAG system of OpenAI actively pulls and displays its copyrighted content to users. This bypasses the need for users to ever visit its encyclopedia and dictionary websites.
Moreover, similar to its 2025 lawsuit against Perplexity AI, an American software company that offers a chatbot-like web search engine product and service based on LLMs and generative AI, the publisher alleges that the crawlers of OpenAI may have ignored technical signals, such as robots instructions, intended to block and prevent automated scraping.
OpenAI has issued a statement defending its practices. It maintains that its models are trained on what it deems as publicly available data and that this process is protected under the fair use doctrine. The company also argues that AI does not merely copy data but transforms it into forms or outputs intended to assist and improve the productivity of its users.
FURTHER READINGS AND REFERENCES
- Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster v. OpenAI. 13 March 2026. United States District Court Southern District of New York. Available online